[Cancelled] An evening with Orlando | Carl E. Schorske Memorial Lecture

Due to unforeseen circumstances, this lecture has been cancelled. We hope to reschedule in 2024-25. For questions, please contact Anna D’Elia, program manager.

Presented by the Program in Media and Modernity, the School of Architecture & the Program in European Cultural Studies

“Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.” Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography as its starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado has fashioned the documentary, ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY, as a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto which premiered and took home four prizes at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero/heroine has inspired readers for their gender fluidity across physical and spiritual metamorphoses over a 300-year lifetime. Preciado casts a diverse cross-section of more than twenty trans and non-binary individuals in the role of Orlando as they perform interpretations of scenes from the novel, weaving into Woolf’s narrative their own stories of identity and transition. Not content to simply update a seminal work, Preciado interrogates the relevance of Orlando in the continuing struggle against anti-trans ideologies and in the fight for global trans rights. Presentation and Q&A with Paul B. Preciado.

Paul B. Preciado is a writer, philosopher, filmmaker and one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and body politics. He is the founder and director of the Institute for Planetary Transition at Luma Arles, France. He has been Curator of Public Programs of documenta 14 (Kassel/Athens), Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion in Venice in 2019, and Head of Research of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA). His books, Counter-sexual Manifesto (Columbia University Press); Testo Junkie (The Feminist Press); Pornotopia (Zone Books); An Apartment in Uranus (Semiotexte and Fitzcarraldo), and Can the Monster Speak (Semiotexte and Fitzcarraldo) are a key reference to queer, trans and non-binary contemporary art and activism. He was born in Spain and lives in Paris. His new book Dysphoria Mundi will be published in English (Graywolf and Fitzcarraldo) in 2024. Preciado’s first film, Orlando: My political biography, premiered at Berlinale in 2023 and received four awards including the Teddy Award for Best LGBT Documentary and the Special Price of the Jury for Best Documentary.

S.E. Eisterer is Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the School of Architecture at Princeton University. Her research focuses on spatial histories of dissidence, feminist, queer, and trans theory, as well as the labor of social and ecological movements. S.E. is currently a Senior Fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and she is working on two book projects: the interdisciplinary history and translation project Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Architecture of Collective Dissidence, 1918–1989 and the edited volume Living Room: Architecture, Gender, Theory, which illuminates methods and theories in writing about feminist and LGBTQIA+ spaces in architecture.