“What’s the Tea?” is a series of events designed by and for trans* and queer individuals to share their personal stories, inspirations, aspirations, and creative work. Centered around the concept of storytelling, the event draws on the slang term “tea” – meaning to share truth or gossip – to create a space where participants spill their own experiences and insights. Themes of transitoriness and transformation are woven through the narratives, highlighting moments that shape identity, creativity, and community. With a focus on “trans*stories” and “transitorities,” the event invites participants to engage in the transient nature of inspiration and self-expression from the guests.
“What’s the Tea?” is conceived by Faris Cucchi, Mzamo Nondlwana and Pêdra Costa and organized by VBKÖ.
What's the Tea? #4 with Lia García (La Novia Sirena)
For Queer Pride Month in Vienna, we are pleased to invite Lia García (Mexico City) and her radical tenderness. She is a performance artist, educator, poet, and detonates an intense pedagogy of love in spaces she calls “edges” and creates dystopias, fractures and other possibilities of restorative justice and collective healing.
Her trans activism has not only focused over time on defending the human rights of LGBTIQ+ communities in Mexico but has also involved creating performative, educational and poetic proposals for public spaces and institutions of symbolic complexity such as prisons, hospitals, schools, military camps and markets, among others.
What has characterized Lia García‘s militancy has been that all her proposals are traversed by aesthetics of radical tenderness, a concept coined and conceptually developed by her in 2012 and that today configures a very particular form of political activism throughout Abya Yala, Latin America. Her affective and artistic-pedagogical interruptions, in addition, deeply question the effects that patriarchal violence exerts on the bodies that disobey the normativity of gender and sexuality, as well as the multiple forms of affectation that we go through living in Mexico, a context of pain and the second country with cases of transfeminicide. “It hurts me what hurts you”, declares Lia among her trans siblings.
Website: https://maranyil.gitlab.io/liasirena/
Organized by Mzamo Nondlwana, Orchi & Pêdra Costa