Trans Temporal Resistances
Curated by Emji Saint Spero and Leila Weefur
Performances by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, Mason J, and Rowan Powell
Closing Program for Transition Times: Re-Membering Anticarceral Resistance in the Tenderloin
Thursday April 25, 2024 | 7-8:30pm
At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
All Welcome! | Free! | Register via Eventbrite
Trans Temporal Resistances is the closing public program for Transition Times: Re-Membering Anticarceral Resistance in the Tenderloin, an archival exhibit contextualizing the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria. Program curators Emji Saint Spero and Leila Weefur invite writers and artists to engage with trans archives and architectures through performance.
This performance series, in collaboration with the TurkxTaylor Initiative, mirrors an open assemblage model. Emji Saint Spero and Leila Weefur invite writers and artists to deconstruct trans archives and architectures through textual and movement-based approaches. Situated within a district in which desire has historically been boundaried and confined, these performances engage Queer Time as an embodied strategy of resistance.
The first event invites three local writers, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, Mason J, and Rowan Powell, to take space at the Tenderloin Museum.
Trans Temporal Resistances is the closing public program for Transition Times: Re-Membering Anticarceral Resistance in the Tenderloin, an exhibit contextualizes the story of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, a queer grassroots uprising against police brutality in August 1966, as recovered by historian Susan Stryker. This exhibition presents selected material from the archival collection that Stryker has painstakingly compiled since the 1990s, a physical model identifying historical queer sites in the Tenderloin’s urban landscape, and a selection of art pieces that demonstrate the riot’s ripple effect in the present. The exhibition highlights the historical significance of the site that today GEO Group, a private prison company, operates as a “halfway house.” It serves as a call to action to join a coalition aiming to liberate the building where the riot took place, designated a local historical landmark. To learn more about the exhibit, click here. Register to attend this program via Eventbrite.
Co-Curators:
Emji Saint Spero (they/them) is a transqueer writer, performer, and pervert living in Los Angeles. They are curious about the potential of creative intimacies to queer the familiar, mapping the boundaries of collective en-gagement through movement, documentation, personal ephemera, and collaborative performance. Saint Spero is co-founder of the Oakland-based small press Timeless, Infinite Light and co-developmental editor for We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan (Nightboat Books x Timeless Infinite Light, 2019). They are the author of disgust (Nomadic Press, 2021) and almost any shit will do (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2014), and have work featured in Trans History in 99 Objects (Hirmer Publishers, 2024). Saint Spero is the curator of Communicator Series, a language-curious queer and trans* performance series at Poetic Research Bureau, and is currently working on two poetry manuscripts, Exhaustion and A Retching.
Ig @homopathetic
Leila Weefur (He/They/She) is an artist, writer, and curator based in Oakland, CA. Through film & installation they examine the performative elements connected to systems of belonging, present in Black, queer, gender-variant life. An entanglement of beauty and horror evokes concepts of sensorial memory, architectural psychology, hyper surveillance, and the erotic. Weefur has worked with local and national institutions including the ICASF, CCA’s Wattis Institute, McEvoy Foundation, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco Art Institute, Museum of the African Diaspora, The Kitchen, and Smack Mellon. Weefur’s writing has been published in SEEN by BlackStar Productions, Sming Sming Books, Baest Journal, and more. Weefur is a lecturer at Stanford University and a member of The Black Aesthetic.
Ig @spikeleila
Writer Bios:
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta (they/them) is a queer Jewish Nicaragüense anarchist, artist, poet, and sexual health educator from the lands of the Tongva people, who is a long term guest on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land. They are the author of The Easy Body (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017) and La Movida (Nightboat Books, 2022), and have been at work on their third book of poetry, Bleeder / Promise of the Red Decade (the manuscript of which lives in an Esprit shoebox), for a really long time.
Mason J. (he/they) is a Blaxican-Indigenous and Sephardic Jewish artist, historian, and community organizer based on Ohlone Land (San Francisco). As a queer writer, visual artist, and disability justice advocate, Mason amplifies marginalized voices. They serve as interim Executive Director of Radar Productions, contributing to projects like SFPL's Show Us Your Spines residency and teaching for the Queer Ancestors Project. Mason's work with Still Here SF reflects their commitment to challenging societal norms through innovative projects.
Rowan Powell is a writer and Ph.D. candidate at UC Santa Cruz. They grew up in rural South West England, and spends time between Oakland and London. Rowan has recently published work with Nightboat Books, PSS Press, STRIKE! and Stir Magazine.