In Strada Statale 696, Dallas Fellini explores trans presence in the cis-hypermasculinized public sphere, using the Italian piazza (public square) as a point of departure. The artist’s body is inserted into a Google Street View image of a piazza in Celano, a small Italian town where their grandparents grew up. This video work seeks to trace an oral history ambiguously passed to them by their Nonna: an oral history about trans and queer people that she was friends with as an adolescent and young adult in Celano. Fellini combines hyper-location-specific sound, imagery, and language to explore their own temporal, geographic, and linguistic distance from this history.

Read: È sempre esistite: A conversation with Rinetta Fellini

Artist Bio:

Dallas Fellini is a curator, writer, and artist living and working in Tkaronto. Their practice is invested in the dissolution of boundaries between different art forms and arts communities, trans and queer histories and futures, community practice, and the intersections of art and popular culture.

Image ID:

A person stands in a Google Maps image of a piazza with their back to the viewer. The text “You can’t pray hard enough” appears at the bottom of the image.