A Journey with an Expiration Date: Notes on Amnesia Letal’s Film Travesía Travesti

This chapter establishes a dialogue with the aesthetic strategies of the documentary Travesía Travesti (Travesty Odyssey, 2021), by Nicolás Videla/Amnesia Letal. The director and their film create an embodied femme gaze, which generates a fluidity between film genres (documentary and autofiction) and models a gender identity dependent on the display of bodies on screen, in the stage, under the beams, and under the streetlights. The hypervisibility of trans bodies in the film becomes part of a longer political project against trans femicide and trans fungibility. Travesía Travesti is also a story about failure. Set in the hype and subsequent domestication of the 2019 revolt in Chile, the film is structured via layered story lines, including a theatrical production, the creators’ lives, trans history and activism, melodrama, an economic plot, and the film production process. Jack Halberstam’s term queer art of failure is used to reflect on the ideas of identity, work, and authorship as categories that reorganize the failure-success binary. Paul Preciado’s idea of a somatheque and their stated need of an expiration date for any creative-intimate-sexual-anticapitalist contract illuminates the process not via the climax or the ending, but the identitarian and artistic journey materialized in the film.