I first met Charlie at one of my favorite events of the year. My “house” mother’s (Renee’s) birthday party at Cowgirl Hall of Fame in the West Village. Charlie is from Italy and comes to NYC to, as they say, allow the magic to happen. I like to think the magic happened when they and I met. Because I’ve been smitten ever since.
After escaping the Illuminati Cult in Spoleto, I was very happy to learn that Charlie was available to have a visitor. I was sad when I learned they were mourning the loss of an entire outdoor art installation. So, I bought my train tickets and made a trip up north to Imola, after a short stop in Falconara Maritima on the Baltic Sea. They described the freak rainstorm that destroyed their exhibition as a metaphysical product of the patriarchy. As if the hand of man-god came down and smashed the entire project to teach them a lesson. It was a powerful image.
The installation is displayed on the hillside of her family home, just south of Bologna. It featured late relatives, friends, and self-portraits of subjects being both queerified and sluttified to oppose heavily Catholicized and patriarchal Italian culture.
“I returned to my ancestral home and took over wielding a queer and trans-feminist vocabulary. I took all these family memories stacked in the basement and gave them a new life, transforming their story, giving them revenge, and creating a new genealogy So this is me at the park,” says Charlie.
Find more of Charlie Fennel’s work here.
