DEL LAGRACE VOLCANO

Del LaGrace Volcano, (formerly known as lesbian photographer Della Grace)
studied filmmaking in 1977-79 before moving to San Francisco and majoring in
photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. s/He received his Masters
in Photographic Studies in 1992 from the University of Derby and has
exhibited his photographs as well as his videos throughout Europe, the
States, Canada and most recently Brasil.

He is the photographer of three monographs, LoveBites, 1991, The Drag King
Book, 1999 and Sublime Mutations, 2000. His filmmaking credits include,
Pansexual Public Porn,1997 A Prodigal Son?, 1998 and Journey Intersex, 1999.

"I’ve possessed and been possessed by a multitude of names, bodies and identities in my forty odd years. Change, mutation and migration are as natural to me as staying the same might be to you. I call (or have called) myself a Gender Terrorist, an Intentional Mutation and Intersex by Design as much to signify that I am the architect of my own destiny as to make a political point. I refute the pathologised status given to those of us who can’t or won’t conform to the binary gender system, that is, the soon to be antiquated notion that there are only two genders: male and female. I refuse the concept of the body beautiful, that there is only one acceptable body type.

debra dianne wood —  Della Grace — lesbian photographer — Del LaGrace Volcano — hermaphrodyke — transman…

JOURNEY INTERSEX - 24th June
Del LaGrace Volcano & Cara Lavan

Del and Heidi are cousins: Del born Debbie and Heidi born Travis. Del was
born with the external features of a female and lived his life as a woman
until the age of 37 but for the past five years has been trying to carve out
a way in which he can lives as both male and female: as intersexed. Heidi
never knew she was anything but a girl, kept from the true facts of her
birth on the advice of the doctors by her family members.

When Del was 12 years old he remembered a cousin being born and for one week
no one being able to say whether the baby was a boy or girl. This raised a
lot of questions for an abnormally developing Del, or Debbie as s/he was
then. It took Del almost twenty years to track down Heidi. They met again in
Seattle, where Heidi was living in the summer of 1997. When Del realised
that Heidi knew nothing about the true circumstances of her birth Del felt
compelled to reveal to her the mystery surrounding her birth feeling it was
unethical for him to have information about Heidi¹s medical condition that
she herself didn¹t have.

Journey Intersex picks up the lives of the cousins at their first meeting
since the revelations three years earlier. In the interim, Heidi hasn¹t
moved on from Del¹s bombshell and has distanced herself from the family who
she says lied to her all her life. In Journey Intersex Del meets Heidi to
try and help her learn she is not a freak through sharing his own
experiences; and to thy and access the hidden facts behind Heidi¹s medical
history. They travel to LA where Heidi tries to find her old doctors and
confronts her estranged mother with the issue for the first time. Her father
is dead, so Heidi turns to her mother for answers which both find painful to
explore.

In the film Del revels that he is one of the thousands of people in Britain
who are not exactly male nor female. At puberty he only ever grew one
breast, realised he had an enlarged clitoris and developed an excessive
amount of facial hair. Recently he has been told that his ovaries contain
testicular tissue. In 1995 he decided to enhance his masculinity thru the
use of testosterone and began to be perceived as male by the outside world.
Heidi talks about the may operations she had as a child, surgeries she now
realises were the result of the medical establishment¹s attempts to make her
intersex body to conform to a female mould and not cancer as she had been
told. 

They meet Howard Devore, a psychologist, therapist and intersex activist who
is intersex himself. Howard is able to cast a soothing light on this very
emotional journey. Ultimately the cousins find that they themselves hold
more of the answers than science or their families can yet offer.

Sublime Mutations - June 26th

The subjects of Del’s art question many of the assumptions of our worlds. How comfortable are we with butch women who take testosterone, what of the high femme lady who refuses to pluck her facial hair, the individual who walks into the men’s toilets who’s gender you cannot read and who’s body gives no easy answers? With a powerful grace and dignity, Dels’ life and work confronts these questions.
"There are no victims in ‘Sublime Mutations’, only heroes and stars. Ordinary folk living extraordinary lives, without the safety net most people take for granted. Each face and each body are a part of Sublime Mutations because they have impressed and inspired me by being exactly who they are. There are many routes to the same location and no hierarchies of transgression. We must all create our own personal strategies for surviving in a world that won’t acknowledge much less validate, our existence. I believe in crossing the line, not just once, but as many times as it takes to weave a web we can all walk on’

‘Sublime Mutations’ will be a presentation of Del’s work, old and new:

Lesbian Boys & Other Inverts", "Ars Poetica" and "Xenomorphisis"

"Hermaphrodyké: Self Portraits of Desire", "TransGenital Landscapes" and "The FTM Visibility Project".

There will be a facilitated discussion, with Del, on issues of queer cultural production and the impact of queer movements in art, theory and life.

VENUE - IFC

DATE - June 24th/26th 2001

TIME - 7-9.30pm

COST - £6/4

INFORMATION - as above.

We particularly welcome transfolk to these events and queer art/activists.