Trans/Lake is a collaboration between the author and performer Alvina Chamberland and the conceptual art duo FYTA. Taking as its starting point the myth of the Swan Lake (as appearing in Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s classic), Trans/Lake explores a series of questions around post-digital intimacy and the emergence of the bellicose terfism especially prevalent in the UK. In this multi-media spectacle auto-biography meets scathing political satire, and pop-culture meets experimental writing and performance.

Set in an all-girls high school, the story narrates the experience of a young trans woman who meets her prince, only for her classmates to turn against her when they find out of her trans-ness. The narrative takes place in a post-digital world, where romantic encounters are mediated not only through traditional social norms (such as cis-heteronormativity) but also through inscrutable algorithmic forces. The characters grapple with the challenges of navigating a world where technology and intimacy collide, while the terf wars rage on in the background.

Alvina Chamberland is one of the most exciting writers of our generation and in this work we put the specificity and originality of her voice at the centre of the project. Alvina brings together a strong point of view on trans issues and the emotional depth and complexity of her formally innovative writing practice. FYTA have recently released their first feature film, ORFEAS2021, a queer remake of Claudio Monteverdi's baroque opera 'L'Orfeo'. ORFEAS2021, explores contemporary issues around the assimilation of queer identities in neo-reactionary politics while following the narrative structure of the Orpheus myth. FYTA and Alvina have collaborated in the past in the context of the Athens-based Sound Acts festival.

A pamphlet published earlier in 2023 alongside a series of performances in London and Athens offered glimpses of the world of Trans/Lake. Trans/Lake is a project that is constantly evolving and transmuting: from text to staged performance, to a series of songs, to video. In its final culmination, we aspire it to be a multimedia experience of cataclysmic overwhelm.

At a time when the relation between art and politics is often reduced to the level of mere assertion – think of the artist rolling out their identity credentials in endless funding proposals where the lingo of the NGO meets the platitudes of the beauty-pageant – we hope that Trans/Lake will go a bit further. This is a work that brings affect to ideas, mixes personal stories with oppressive histories, puts forward political convictions without shying away from contradictions. We hope that it will contribute to the ongoing dialogue around gender but more broadly about how we relate to each other in times of generalised uncertainty.

Trans/Lake has been developed with the support of Arts Council England.

BioAlvina Chamberland is a Swedish-US American writer and performance artist based in Berlin. She has an MA in gender studies from Södertörns Högskola, with a thesis on trans feminine sisterhood and intersectionality in New York City. In 2015 Bokförlaget ETC published her co-authored book Allt som är Mitt: Våldtäkt, Stigmatisering och Upprättelse (English translation: All that is mine: Rape, Stigmatization and Reparation), which was the beneficiary of a grant from the Swedish Arts Council. In September 2018 her novel Utelåst – Uppväxtnostalgi för freaks (Locked Out – A nostalgic account of growing up for freaks), a parody of the coming of age-genre, was published by Dockhaveri Förlag. She has been widely published in journals and newspapers in both Swedish and English and her first English language novel, Love the World or Get Killed Trying, will be published by Noemi Press in March 2024.

FYTA (meaning: plants) is a conceptual audio-textual performance and curation duo from Athens. some of the central concerns of FYTA are: a rethinking of notions of the ‘radical’ in political art, the debunking of myths of hellenism and hellenic influences in the Western canon, the relationship between underground grassroots art movements and art institutions and the queer art of failure as a somatic expression of resistance. FYTA have curated a number of (usually performance-based) shows working closely with the Athens queer community, as well as produced their own artifacts, ranging from music albums, fauxcumentaries, poetry and installations. In their previous work, ORFEAS2021 they ‘queerified’ the myth of Orpheus as Claudio Monteverdi had presented it in his opera L’Orfeo. Now they turn their attention to another classic, Swan Lake by Pyotr Tchaikovsky.