Artist and designer Diamela Burboa: “When I talk about my transit, I don’t talk about a before and an after”

“I have lost my body so many times between these universal forms of feminine, masculine, humanity and their images and words. When I go out on the street, I notice it when people call me miss and no one hesitates to call me miss. And I look out the corner of my eye out the window to see a young woman, knowing that this is what I have become. Two years after bringing Diamela, I still hold Diego in my arms every day”artist and designer born and raised in Buin, Diamela Burboa, shares on her networks.

One of her latest works, in which she makes a photographic recording of different items of clothing – t-shirts, pants, skirts, underwear and socks – which she associates with words or comments she received in the street on day she wore them, reveals that everyone always has something to say about our bodies, and that no one is absolutely safe from it. Except women. Much fewer trans women.

“If this were made more explicit, perhaps this could be part of the knowledge and knowledge that we could use to our advantage,” he reflects today. “Several of my exercises have as their central axis the recognition of the fact that others have a great influence on the way we construct our identity. In a way, recognizing this shared pact that is our body can be an opportunity to know, an opportunity to become a true expert in communication with the body and with the rest.

And, as Diamela explains, if we are to be conditioned by others, it is better to have an active role and this will allow us to be more empathetic and aware of others.

Here, in an intimate conversation mediated by a screen, she speaks of her gender transition as a spectrum and an ongoing process, not as a before and after; be able to recognize and integrate Diego into his current Diamela; pleasure beyond sexuality; stop inhabiting the binary (both in gender, in tasks, in positions and in opinions) to give space to the ambiguous and the amorphous; and the place that others occupy in the permanent construction of their body and their identity.

“When I talk about my transition, I distinguish between a more social process, in which I decide to share with others that my name will no longer be Diego and that they will start addressing me with other pronouns , and another process. it comes from before and it’s more personal and experimental.

The social transition, the one that is accompanied by technical and practical things, and which goes hand in hand with hormone replacement therapy, began a little over two years ago, just at the start of the pandemic. Being away from others allowed me to see how I felt about something I had already started experiencing some time ago and helped me make the most visible or notable decision, so the more social.

But the other side is marked by an experimentation that came from before. I had already used gender-neutral pronouns, asked my friends to call me “La Diego,” and explored my clothes and body.

For that, When I talk about my transit, I’m not talking about a before and after, which is usually the prevailing narrative in slightly more traditional transit stories. At no point did I feel like I was born again or that I had become a different person. In doing so, I also didn’t want to deny my past. I don’t know, in fact, if I have ever felt represented by this way of understanding gender transition, which sometimes seems to me to be part of a very binary logic.

Rather, it is a process that allows me, on the one hand, to recognize and realize certain material changes, but also to recognize my life before Diamela. It also allows me to recognize that Everything that existed in this case before is constitutive of my experience and my experiential process with gender, to the point where I finally decided to name it that because I already needed other people to be involved and I needed to change the way those people socialized with me.

I never hated or wanted to eliminate Diego, rather I made him part of the process and I hold and wear him every day of my 24 years. And it’s important because beyond the practical changes – I like to think like this because it makes things more plastic – I continue to recognize myself in everything that existed before.

I’m not going to say it was easy, because at first I thought I would have liked to have been born Diamela, or that Diamela had always been there. But this anxiety of wanting to get rid of what we carry behind us dissipated and I was able to positively affirm my body as a body in transit. Not as a finite body, or as at one time it was something and at another time it was something else, but as a corporeality that is recognized and named through constant transformation. It is constitutive of my identity and my work.

Therefore, the search for identity and specifically the great influence of others in this construction is a fundamental part of my daily search. I like to see my work as a series of dynamic exercises – closely related to viewing forms or school documents – of things that happen to me or of experiences and thoughts that I collect in my daily life.

One of my latest pieces is a compilation of garments that I photographed separately and which are associated with words or phrases that were said to me on the day I put them on. In truth, it’s a job that I’ve been doing since my diploma project – I obtained my designer diploma last year – and that I wanted to expand because it has to do with write down thoughts, fears or situations that affect me on a daily basis. It’s a bit about being able to materialize all of this to have it before our eyes, to naturalize it and make it a power rather than a threat. Also being able to show that the rest has its place in the construction of my body and my identity. and that, rather than denying it, it must be demonstrated in order to make it knowledgeable and knowledgeable.

Clothes are constitutive of the act of cross-dressing, of this daily cross-dressing, and in a certain way, I am aware that I generate a character in this daily gesture, but this is only complete when I confront the rest of the people . It is as if, in this particular work, he openly acknowledges that others are a fundamental part of those daily actions that we believe to be personal. It’s like saying I’m finishing getting dressed while everyone is looking at me. It’s a pact.

And behind each of these little maps – I like to see them like this – there is knowledge, because when such an obvious recording is made, knowledge appears about clothing, about the way in which we construct our body and our identity. awareness of what this generates in others. This is where this ability to create a dialogue through corporeality is clearly affirmed.

I knew, for example, that with certain clothes they were going to treat me in a masculine way, they were going to call me a boy or a partner. With others they were going to call me a woman, a little girl, a girl, a pretty girl, my love, a lady, a witch, a skinny girl or a queen. Many of my works have this; explicitly recognizing the influence of others on our being and exploring this shared pact that is our body, but not as something negative, but as an opportunity for knowledge. Because this knowledge places us in a more active position in the face of what happens.

This requires observation and experimentation. I think very much that we fear ambiguity, nuances, but it is good to do the exercise of overcoming this ambiguity through experimentation and implementing exercises with the aim of recognizing that there are so many things that condition us which are only simple social constructions, that’s why not take them, dismantle them, write them down and assemble others.

Instead of letting the words that were said to me pass, for example, I wrote them down and made them the protagonists. Even having them there and facing them, I automatically introduced another element to the day and it allowed me to have another perspective. When this observation deepens, it gives us the opportunity to understand these invisible networks that support daily life. Being able to intervene in it makes it more ours. This is why words are essential in my work; These are small trials of large research processes. Or what I get out of a daily process.

For example, back when I had a more confused gender expression, people would yell at me and stop me in the street. I wore dresses and had a beard. The less they understood me, the more violence they did to me. I recorded all of that. The more I fit into a category, or the closer I got to the cisgender ideal, the less they discriminated against me, but now I experience more street harassment.

“I think a lot about pleasure, but beyond the sexual, which in itself is rare in educational establishments, even more so for dissident corporalities. For me today the idea of ​​pleasure is associated with these sharing processes. And I think that for people who go a little against the current sex-gender system, the pleasure lies in the moments of rest and in finding places where you can let your guard down. It is about opening spaces and emphasizing certain ways of socializing and understanding, but not to always be in the struggle, but so that life is less resistance and more rest and pleasure.

The pleasure is to have places where you don’t feel like you’re walking on eggshells; have care spaces, in which we do not necessarily think of ourselves as trans or transvestite. I know it’s important, on the one hand, but also to be able to feel that it’s not the only thing that determines us. In the end, when I remember who I am the most, it’s when it reminds me the most of it in a violent way.

Many things that are common and ordinary for cis people are great difficulties for us. Go to the doctor, go to the dentist, have them examine our mouth, our hair, our skin. Today, the pleasure is in achieving small things that often seem impossible.