Agustina Comedi and Nico Pereda | Voices, Poses, and Gestures

In the 1990s, police edicts that prohibited sex work in Argentina were revoked. And yet, the criminalization of sex work persists under a phantasmagoric apparatus. The manufactured voice of the police articulates the figures that create sex-work stigma and make it possible to punish under the law. "Voices, Poses, and Gestures" is a collective effort to recover the traces of these stigma from a judicial archive, within the framework of an ongoing film.

About the Speakers

Agustina Comedi (Argentina, 1986) is a filmmaker known for her exploration of the ties between archive, memory, and fabulation. In 2017, she premiered her debut film El Silencio es un Cuerpo que Cae which received multiple awards and went on to be screened at over sixty international festivals. Her 2019 film Playback, Ensayo de una Despedida was exhibited in over 130 international festivals and won Best National Short film at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival and the Teddy Award (2020) at the Berlinale Short Films Competition. Both of her films were curated by Nan Goldin for a special program at Metrograph NY and exhibited at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and Tabakalera San Sebastian. Agustina is currently working on her second and third films.

Nicolás Pereda is a filmmaker whose work explores the everyday through fractured and elliptical narratives using fiction and documentary tools. His work has been the subject of more than 30 retrospectives and has been presented in most major international film festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, New York, and Toronto, as well as in galleries and museums like the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York.

This event is co-sponsored with the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Bay Area Latinx Art and Activism and Critical Carceral Studies Collective Research Workshops.