2 Into You (2024) Single channel high-definition video (color, sound), 3:41 minutes.
"Hi, I’m Kolya, and this is my friend Zoe. Can you tell that we are trans?
For Jacques Lacan, the mirror stage names the traumatic experience of coming upon a supposedly whole, external image of the body, so contradictory with the fragmentation and inconsistency of actual embodiment. Do you think me and Zoe look alike?
The video artist Gillian Wearing has this piece where 2 boys sit languidly in front of a camera and lipsynch to audio of their mother which alternates between deep love and maternal frustration. Then it cuts to the mother speaking her children’s opinions of her, barely able to keep up with their wandering, juvenile speech.
I can see Zoe right now, and she can see me. She should probably keep her eyes on the script though.
Historian Jules Gill-Peterson says that gender dysphoria is not a trans term, not a disorder that resides within me, but the result of others assigning and surveilling my gendered body. Whenever I go to the doctor, she asks me what my transition goals are. To look like you. To look like me.
For theorist Paul Preciado, transness is not a unique, medical practice, but describes those whose techno-sexual supplementation is stigmatized and denormalized, allowing cisgender people to feel normal about their Viagra prescriptions, contraceptive techniques, dick enlargement surgeries, boob jobs, and pronouns
When people like me and Zoe appear on screens like the one you’re watching right now, we’re usually a joke. To be fair, we’re both pretty funny. Is there a part of you that wants to see what's in our pants?
My friend posts recordings of her voice on Reddit to see if she sounds enough like a woman. I’m too lazy to train like that. This seems to work alright anyways. What do you think I look like?
McKenzie Wark identifies dissociation as a distinctly trans technique, a flight from the ill-fitting body. Am I here right now? Barring Wark, almost every trans person in the academy is a man. Almost every trans person in the movies is a woman.
J. Jennifer Espinoza has a poem called “I Imagine All My Cis Friends Laughing at Tranny Jokes”. I made Zoe read it before we filmed this. Espinoza writes “I’ve built houses in the corners of houses and filled them with all my longings” It ends, “The time has come for me to be alive and for you to stop speaking. Please stop speaking.”
Do I like speaking your words, Kolya? / Do you like speaking my words Zoe?"
kolya shields 