Images from left to right: Screenshot of Lorenzo Triburgo via Zoom (October 7, 2021); “For Missy” from Triburgo’s Policing Gender series; “For Tre” from Triburgo’s Policing Gender series; “Luna” from Triburgo’s Shimmer Shimmer series (2020).

Last week I had the pleasure of welcoming artist and educator Lorenzo Triburgo for a class visit to my graduate seminar Gender, Culture and Media at The New School.

Lorenzo and I met a little over a decade ago when we were both graduate students—in different programs and different schools—and I’ve been thinking about how much has changed in the last decade or so in terms of identity politics and movements designed to raise awareness, decolonize gender, and in Lorenzo’s framing “[elevate] trans queer subjectivity.” Their work has been a response to these changes as well as a prompt for additional considerations related to ideas around performing gender and other topics our seminar is unpacking, producing a model for dialogue. It isn’t fixed or didactic, rather an invitation to think about and question the rigid heteronormative/hegemonic structures that currently inform and govern society in limiting and damaging ways.

They shared their work—which spans photography, video, audio, and performance—and discussed how they use various approaches and methodologies to address and subvert (or queer) current representation practices and vocabularies surrounding expressions of gender and how they intersect with existing power dynamics.