TILFA
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TILFA *
TILFA is short for ‘Trans Is Latin For Across”, a poem by transmasculine author S. Yarberry that I adapted into an interactive web art piece.
I thought that the further that I got along in my transition, coming out wouldn’t be something that I would have to do anymore. When I first arrived at university after four years as an openly transgender high school student (and all the baggage that comes with that label), I made the decision that I would do what is known in the transgender community as “going stealth”. Basically, going stealth means you do your best to blend it, be like everyone else, and never let your cisgender peers know that you are different. This project was my way of reclaiming my transgender identity in a time when doing so is scarier than ever. In the face of increasing bigotry towards trans people, I wanted others to understand that transgender people are just like everyone else- normal people.
The TILFA website was entirely hand-coded with CSS, HTML, and p5.js.
Website Mockup
As an aspect of this project, I created a poster using created graphics made for the website. I printed out around thirty of these posters and wheat-pasted fifteen around queer areas in San Francisco, and gave the remaining fifteen out to people who requested them.
Poster
The final aspect of the project was creating a “shrine'“ both to S. Yarberry’s poetry collection ‘A Boy in the City’ where the poem ‘Trans is Latin for Across’ comes from as well as to my own works of writing, which is symbolized by my notebook placed alongside A Boy in the City. Finally, the shrine was surrounded by some of the remaining posters before being exhibited.
