“What else is the body but a territory, a situation – emotional, social, political, physical – that continuously changes and performs its kaleidoscopic identities?”
BY FRANCESCA ALAIMO, IMAGES BY FRANCESCA ALAIMO
Are you a woman or a man? Random passenger on a bus, Rome 1999.
London 2025, echoes of that question still buzzing in my ear. Am I a woman or a man? I am queer, that I know. But where is my gender identity rooted? Is it my brain? Is it my body?
As an artist, I have been continuously reframing these questions through paintings and interventions on photographs, portraying my many Selves as they felt true and real at the time. My art is all about transformation, not only of the subject but the materials too. In fact, each portrait I do, I also undo. Hot liquid wax is an incredible medium that, when poured onto a painting and then removed, transforms it at whim – escaping from my own imagination and control. Each piece is an intervention on and intervention with and the artwork becomes the object and the maker of itself. It reminds me of that figure in the mirror that is me, but it isn’t, yet – wait! It is. The body I see and the body I feel. The body I carry and the body that carries me. What else is the body but a territory, a situation – emotional, social, political, physical – that continuously changes and performs its kaleidoscopic identities?
As a queer non-binary female masculine-of-centre artist, I portray my recurring struggle with – and acceptance of – my own body, which carries a sense of flaw and imperfection, a dissociation between my feminine parts and functions and my masculine identity. I paint my journey from one body to another, from one socially constructed self to a deeper truer one, turning my feminine drape inside out: from a skinned, marked, traumatised yet survivor body; to a theatrical, transformative, multigender figure; from a muscular small-breasted, menstruating, in-transition body; to a defiant, self-affirming unapologetic figure and a softer, self-loving, vulnerable self. The visual results are bodies that manifest a circumstance, a landscape, a battlefield, but nonetheless a shrine.
Someone said: “All the world’s stage, and all the men and women merely players […] and one man in his time plays many parts“. Theatre is the magical world of escapism, where we can be someone else, where reality and deception nurture and subvert each other. Yet, isn’t it just a mirror of the world? Like the many roles of an actor on a stage, we wear masks and enact personas in social contexts every day. So, what is art? An escapism? An affirmation? An empowering act? A communication, a transaction, an expression? A perfect representation of what we see? As I was growing up, I was bombarded by tales of a perfect family, perfect job, perfect body, perfect artwork, perfect beauty, perfect life. Only later I realised that what is perfect is forever stuck in its own perfection. It is, in fact, dead. Therefore, art can only be a positive intervention. It requires an interest in change, a subversion of expectations, a questioning observation, a manipulation of perspectives and the pursuit of flaw and imperfection as powerful sources of creation.
Like a surgical procedure, my art performs a gender-ectomy in plain sight; it explores the relationship between fear and disobedience, shame and desire, acceptance and self-love; it looks at the triggers of our core wounds and our fragility when we challenge the oppressive and typecasting hetero-normative gaze; it represents the strength to subvert all expectations, and the pain and determination we invest in that struggle.
Today, when I recall that question on a bus in Rome in 1999, I think the answer would be: I am gender trans-lucence; something I will never be able to outline or bring its infinite facets into focus; a semi-transparent screen behind which silhouettes are visible yet unrecognisable and which glows of its own vital light.
Find out more here: francescaalaimoartist.com/
Francesca Alaimo’s work is currently showing in The F Word exhibition at the Firepit gallery in North Greenwich until 31 January, in the Soho Open exhibition at Great Pulteney Street gallery until 23 November and in the Discerning Eye exhibition at the Mall Galleries until 23 November.
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