By Mila Edensor
Victoria Verseau is a Swedish artist and filmmaker who revels in the unknown. Inspired by her journey of transition, gender affirming surgery in Thailand, and the death of her friend Meryl, Verseau’s artwork reflects a practice of processing these many feelings, complicated and elusive, to transform them into a cohesive whole.
Victoria Verseau. Retrieved from www.whitechapelgallery.org.
Her latest documentary film, Trans Memoria (2024), is one of her most touching works to date. Following her journey back to Thailand, she retraces the halls of the clinic where she first met Meryl, and two other women – Athena and Aamina. In the film, we see Victoria, Athena and Aamina reflect on their experiences, the death of a friend, and the pursuit of love in a world that deems you unworthy.
Having just completed a global tour of Trans Memoria, and picking up an impressive collection of awards along the way, GAY45 sat down with Verseau to talk about the film, her wider practice, and the experiences that bind them all together:
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Mila Edensor (ME): Trans Memoria was my first introduction to your work – I saw it at Queer Lisboa. It’s gorgeous. So imagine my surprise when later, going through your wider practice, I realised how much of your previous art was woven into the film!
Victoria Verseau (VV): Well, I think it gives me a lot of energy to work between the art world and the film world. I feel like in the art world, I can be more free and more subtle and unclear. I feel that in the film world, it’s a bit difficult to finance a film when it’s very artistic. I have had the impression that you shouldn’t be too unclear, that you should know in full what you’re communicating to the audience – and that can make it too simplistic, surface level. So I think incorporating the art pieces made the film much better. And in this way I approached a more poetic dimension.
ME: I understand… I mean, the film gives the audience lots of different opinions to digest – so in that sense, you chose to communicate using art because it’s better for dealing with the unclear?
VV: Yeah, I realise the older I get that there aren’t really any solid answers. I can’t find any. I think you can see things from different sides. My main goal with the film was to be more complex, to ask more questions, in place of just answering questions. Also by having us three in the film, we’re so different – me, Athena, and Aamina, it shows how there are as many trans narratives as there are trans people.
ME: For me, the film registered as a labour of love. Almost a therapeutic exercise. Was it healing to make?
VV: I think it has been very two-sided. When we recorded, mostly filming Thailand in 2019, I was extremely depressed. I was so scared that I would end the way Meryl did. But I’m much better today; I found some kind of way. But I think coming back to your question, the film was the only thing that carried me. I felt that I needed to finish this story. I needed to tell this story. I can’t disappear now because now I have this goal – but at the same time, it almost made me cave under, because even just making a film is so difficult.
“Monument 2012”, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
ME: Let’s now take a look at your wider artistic practice. There’s a frequent focus on preserving memories in physical objects, for example in Monument 2012. Why was this memory so poignant?
VV: Well, I think I have to start by saying that the more I work with something, the more difficult it becomes to let go. I think because it’s through the art that I want to make something physical out of the invisible, out of memories and experiences.
But yeah, Monument 2012 is the H&M jacket that I solidified, based on a memory from that year. I had this great dream – very heteronormative – I had this idea of being a woman, whatever that is, and finding this hetero-cis man. Now, it’s very different for me.
But that jacket I actually wore when, right after Thailand, I met this guy that I had seen before. He didn’t remember me, because I’d changed a lot, but he was so interested in me and we started to date. He didn’t know I was trans, and then when he found out he was a bit interested for a while, but then he was like, ‘no. I’ve been through that so many times but it’s not impossible; I have a boyfriend now. But I think when he broke things off, that was, maybe it sounds a bit banal, but I think that something inside me broke, you know, and I think that’s universal.
ME: It’s becoming more common for trans people to move beyond a heteronormative ideal, no? Especially compared to decades prior.
VV: Yeah, I think this is a perspective I hadn’t seen so much. But God, I think differently today, and I have had a cis, hetero boyfriend for 10 years now – so sort of ‘the dream’… But it wasn’t what I thought it was. Looking at the relationship between the physical and the unphysical, this jacket is a physical object that represents this idea of this dream breaking.
“Dissolved Monument”, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
ME: So, this is an idea you’ve preserved, but your own feelings towards the subject have also transformed. I think we see that in the journey from Monument 2012 (2018) to Dissolved Monument (2020). What did it mean to refashion the original into neon?
VV: I think that I became obsessed with this jacket, almost like it was a person with a reality of its own. It was a dead object, and it gained a soul for me. I was sketching it all the time, and these sketches, these lines, I transformed into neon and made it three dimensional. I think neon is so interesting. It’s very ephemeral. Do you say ephemeral? It’s this gas that becomes visible and gains this color when you add electricity, there’s this process of capturing it in glass material – I think it’s fascinating. And maybe the closest you can get to like a ghost.
I wish that there was something beyond death, but I doubt it. In Swedish folk culture, they say that the fog on meadows is the dead dancing. It feels connected with the neon. But I know it’s just a material as well.
“Hope is a Dangerous Thing for Women Like Us”, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
“Hope is a Dangerous Thing for Women Like Us”, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
ME: I was fascinated by the exhibition “Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For Women Like Us” (2022), inspired by the Lana Del Rey song, “Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For A Woman Like Me To Have (But I Have It)”. What was the reason for the change in title?
VV: I didn’t want to give people a final answer in the title. I wanted visitors to find their own answers. I wanted to show that there could still be hope.
ME: When I saw it, it felt like it was highlighting how trans and cis women have different experiences under similar pressures, showing how facing the same thing can produce a different journey.
VV: Totally. And I think we just have more experiences of other things. It’s a very rich life. I think it’s an exciting life. It’s very difficult, but it’s also given me so much. Like, I have so much to tell, so much I need to digest.
Being trans is amazing in a way, and I want to express that. This idea of womanhood, I think it’s something that changes constantly for me. Like sometimes I forget that ‘oh, I have this trans experience!’, and then other days, I’m like ‘oh, this is my reality,’ so it’s also a process.
I think lately in the last year or so I started to connect with that person I was before the transition. If the transition ever has the beginning and ending? I don’t think so, in a way. But when I was more of a non-binary person, I’ve started to bring that person back. I sort of cut off contact with that part of life, but now I see it as part of my story. I have been a little bit ashamed about that person, but now I feel more accepting of them. So it has all these differences once again, these different angles on it. It’s constantly changing.
“Approaching A Ghost”, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
ME: I love your perspective on disillusion. Paraphrasing a quote from your website, ‘if disillusion arises from the clash between personal dreams and reality – what first shaped those dreams, that sense of self and the hope behind them’. In the film and your exhibitions, we see piles of objects: dilators, empty tabs of estradiol. Do these objects represent the clash in material form?
VV: It’s a difficult and interesting question, you know. What creates those dreams? I’ve known I was a girl since I was three. And going back to that heteronormative dream again, because it’s been one I’ve been striving for for the longest time. Maybe it was created by living in a very heteronormative society, a small town in Sweden in the 90s, alongside all these these films that we were fed with, the princess finding a prince. Maybe that creates the dream.
Looking at these objects, objects that represent trying to reach this goal the dream becomes inherent, in these dilators for example. I’ve had them in me so many times. It’s been one crazy struggle, and I think in the end I never quite achieved it.
So I think it’s not just a representation, but these physical objects possess this dream’s energy. I think the older I got, I realised that all of these dreams had just been illusions, ideas about how it would be. I think defining that which lies behind the dream can be very difficult, because this dream has been your truth, then you achieve it, and then behind it is perhaps an emptiness or a normality.
When you struggle so much it becomes a part of your identity. And when that struggle is over, I think you have to find something else. Maybe that’s what they call post-op depression, I don’t know. Athena talks about this in the film saying that you have to find a new goal, something new to strive for, and that maybe this drives life itself.
“A Body of Ghosts”, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
ME: Two of your works come to mind looking at this changing relationship with the past. A Body of Ghosts (2019) was very open and in a bright environment. And yet, in Engender My Past (2020), this same narrative is again distilled into hollow neon objects, sketched into the air. What changed along the way?
VV: A Body of Ghosts was my starting point to this whole project, it includes all these exhibitions, film and video works. I think I was a bit more unsure about what I was getting at, so in that sense it’s a little bit more dense and bright. Since then, I’ve ventured into the darkness, into the unknown. In the other exhibitions, they’ve become a little more violent and dark. They feel like almost iterations of the first.
“Approaching a Ghost”, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
ME: So, in a playful twist, you’ve settled on leaving things up for interpretation. I see that best in the Approaching a Ghost (2021) installation. It changes depending on where you are within the exhibition, it seems like no one walks away having seen the same thing.
VV: Totally! I think that for all the exhibitions I want to create a choreography for the visitor. Almost like architecture, almost like moving through life. As the exhibition unfolds, you get more and more keys. So that when you leave you’re somewhere else physically, but also mentally.
ME: As a final question, how does reflecting on the past through your art shape what’s to come next?
VV: I almost see my life in different eras. When I was younger, I was so restless, and I was traveling all the time. I did things for a month, and then I would change again. I think I lived a very intense and sometimes traumatic but also euphoric life. So now it’s another era, another time. Now it’s the time to digest and tell all these things. That’s my greatest meaning now, it’s what carries me. I’ve found a spirituality through art, and my whole practice right now is drawn from that. Maybe it will change in the future. I work with these different projects that take many shapes and transition over time. Who knows what will come next.
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