Dueñas de la Noche: Trans Lives and Dreams in 1980s Caracas is an intimate exhibition on the lower level of the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) with one subject at its center: Manuel Herreros de Lemos and Mateo Manaure Arilla’s 1982 documentary “Trans.” In a darkened room, the 22-minute film screens on a loop. A slideshow plays in a neighboring room lined with production photos, and vitrines hold ephemera including invitations to screenings and newspaper clippings.
Herreros de Lemos and Manaure Arilla spent a year with a group of trans women, or transformistas, as they called themselves, who survived as sex workers in Caracas, Venezuela. The film is the exhibition’s clear centerpiece, and may be the only chance most people will get to see it — even upon its release, the filmmakers struggled to secure screenings; as the introductory text notes, at its premiere, police tried to arrest them as well as 25 trans women. (It’s now in the ISLAA Library and Archives collection, so hopefully it will show up more often in the future.)
In its short run time, the film touches on several troubling but unsurprising topics: violence against women, social and economic discrimination, familial estrangement. In one especially heartbreaking sequence, a young woman cut off by her family explains that she lives in low-income housing because the social “outsiders” (e.g. those in poverty due to substance abuse or mental health issues) who reside there are the only people she’s encountered who will not harass or ostracize her. We see women going about their daily routines, dressing up and visiting the hair salon, and expressing their desires and dreams.
The film is well worth seeing for the interviews alone, but what makes it stand out from many documentaries on queer or feminist topics is its aesthetic quality, at once abstracting the documentary format into a sumptuous visual field and embodying its subjects’ styles and social milieus. It opens in a nightclub as a performer who calls herself Venezuela lip-synchs to Irene Cara’s iconic 1980 anthem “Fame” wearing a fur bikini. From there, frame after frame is awash in tints of indigo or rose, with glints of gold from dresses or spotlights, pink and silver from neon signs and streetlights. In the daytime, Herreros de Lemos and Manaure Arilla seem to soften the surrounding world to suit the women, no matter how harsh their circumstances. Greenery peeks out from a white fence behind the young woman described in the previous paragraph and, in the muted natural light, her rouge complements her lilac pants. In another interview, a woman in a flower-print dress discusses her inability to “behave like a man” when she’s always felt like a woman. For the moment, each of the subjects is enclosed in a filmic world colored by femininity and glamour.
The production photos and ephemera, all part of ISLAA’s collection, comprise an important archive for a cultural document that easily could have been lost to time. As exhibition texts explain in Spanish and English, the filmmakers’ Spanish-language notes record technical and diaristic details. At one point, for instance, a stranger threw a rock at one woman and, in response, her male friends beat him up.
The photographs project the women’s magnetism, above all. Some are compelling for their compositions; one spectacular work shows a dramatic silhouette against a light gray background, next to the geometric shadow of a protruding wall. For the most part, the women are the stars of glamorous and playful images that could have been fashion shoots in a different context. Even among so many charismatic photos, though, I kept coming back to a black and white picture of a blond woman in a halter dress with a slit up to her hip. The white of her dress and the light from the building behind her almost pulsate in contrast with the black night sky. Just above the center we see her face, as she stares intently at something in the distance. Framed by her pale hair, she is luminous and unforgettable.
Dueñas de la Noche: Trans Lives and Dreams in 1980s Caracas continues at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (142 Franklin Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through April 5. The exhibition was curated by Omar Farah, Lucas Ondak, Clara Prat-Gay, Andrew Suggs, Micaela Vindman, and Clara von Turkovich.
