The first time I saw Camila Sosa Villada It was in the unipersonal “Tolendas Carnes”, based on writings of Federico García Lorca, which represented in 2009, in the La Car garage, of his native Córdoba. There I checked that he was a great dramatic actress, something that over the years would confirm. In addition, she is a talented writer, as she demonstrated in “Las Malays”his first novel, in which he tells how a group of transvestites survives who are sex workers. That book not only positioned it as one of the most original voices of the contemporary Argentine narrative, but it was the beginning of a trajectory in which it continued to immerse itself in issues that are usually not spoken. For example, the existential crisis suffered by the protagonist of “Thesis on a domestication”, whose cinematographic version stars alongside the Mexican actor Alfonso Herrera and that has just been released, directed by Javier Van de Couter, with whom he had already worked in the movie “Mía”, in 2011.
Passing through Buenos Aires, where he presented “The betrayal of my language”his new text edited by Tusquets (Grupo Planeta), in which he reflects in a sharp and poetic way about erotic, past and childhood, receives news despite an annoying flu state that has it as a crouched wolf, although ready to defend himself with claws and teeth.
News: How is Camila born?
Camila Sosa Villada: In 1982, for a chemical reaction to two elements that should never have crossed, that were my dad and my mom. He was latent a couple of years learning how to do to express himself. Then, when he had 13, more or less in the ’95, he began to go out to walk at night when the town fell asleep. Camila dressed and went for a walk through Mina Clavero. There he took his first steps and nobody else stopped. He ate the host and only the guest was left.
News: Why did you choose that name?
Sosa Villada: I liked it, but then I put an epic that really is not so true. I remember seeing the movie “Camille Claudel”, with the French Isabelle Adjani and I liked the name. At first I said that Valentina called me, but I liked Camila. It has no particular epic.
News: Are your last names real?
Sosa Villada: Yes, with the gender identity law you could not put a last name that was not yours.
News: Can you identify the first details that made your feminine condition feel?
Sosa Villada: Ah, no, I have no idea. What does register is warning, challenges. I did not identify me as feminine, as a masculine, or as a costume. For me it was all natural, because if it did not seem that there was a doctrine that teaches you how to be. I, the truth that lived isolated and did not see other transvestites in the street. It was within a family of three, where two were adults and heterosexuals. At some point I realized that what was happening to me caused a rejection in others and they figh, but it was never something that I had full awareness. On the contrary, everything was quite unconscious.
News: I deduce, for what he is telling, that his parents did not understand or supported it.
Sosa Villada: But what father would have understood and supported that in a town? They did what they told them they had to do to try to save their son of something that was supposed to be super dangerous and ended up being like that. In addition, they were right. It was for them a quite large blow that is still processing it.
News: Is there a precise moment in which they saw their transformation?
Sosa Villada: It must have been at 14. My dad opened the door at a time I didn’t have to do it and I was trying a dress he had made with a curtain. But, it is dangerous to speak like this, of dates or ephemeris regarding transvestism. It seems that there will be talk of a type of doctrine or something that is learned or something that is fulfilled in a certain way and things are being given much more natural, much more organic. I think that transitions of trans or transvestites are much more natural and less consulted than a first communion or confirmation or when you received or when such a thing happened.
News: Did the question bother you?
Sosa Villada: It is usually a question that is asked to us trying to decipher something that is as natural as accepting or not the gender they gave you when you were born. What happens is that we are less populationly because thousands have died, also because there are many who are afraid. But I don’t think it’s the order of ephemeris. The tone in which you have to talk about transvestism seems to me that it is naturally. It seems to me a mistake and it is dangerous, especially in times, as well as these, where that is said of “with my children.” I repeat you again, I did it behind closed doors in a house where we were three. No one indoctrined me, which makes me think that it is from another order that has nothing to do with learning, with which they show you or do not show you something. This is the order of identity and not of sexuality.
News: What is the relationship with your parents today?
Sosa Villada: Very good. There is nothing to reproach. The life of constant reproach is sad. He cleared me reading Sharon Olds (American writer and poet). When reading it I understood some issues about paternity and motherhood, which are almost as difficult as being children.
News: Obviously, you cannot live anchored in the past.
Sosa Villada: There were also beautiful things. What happens is that sometimes everything is dyed from a story in which trans people are hated by our parents. I think of my father and my mother and all the love I received. Even in that enormous repression gesture they had, there was something of order, the fear of protecting and thinking about what will happen to this creature when it is bigger.
News: Unfortunately there is still transphobia.
Sosa Villada: In the community, in the LGBTQ+community, in politics, in the literary world, the cinematographic, everywhere there is transphobia.
News: Can it be reversed at some point?
Sosa Villada: You can give good pineapples. You can learn to defend yourself better. Arguing better, being even more aggressive than transformal attacks are. I also have any doubt that there is homophobia and misogyny. If you are not fucking, you are Jewish, or fat, or old, or immunosuppressed. There is hatred of the other, people hate others all the time.
News: Why will it be?
Sosa Villada: Because the other is unbearable. What do you want me to tell you, the other is always unbearable. I am quite antisocial. People usually cause me quite stinging.
News: The world lives complicated moments with issues such as sexual identity and recognition of rights.
Sosa Villada: Here too. I have an identity document that says that I am a woman, it does not say that I am trans. Rights are always vulnerable. Any right is vulnerable. It is good that we know how they conquer and how they defend themselves because they mean an improvement in the life of one.
News: Are we on the right track or are we numb?
Sosa Villada: No, the world has no arrangement. Before the transvestites we generated more fear. Seeing a transvestite on the street, stopped in a corner, was like an event. Suddenly, it began to happen that they began to assimilate and that results in the loss of the wild. Domestications always make one lose the fangs. I know you have to recover it, but I don’t know if we are on a good or bad road because it is not a job that I do. I am not a sociologist or anthropologist. I have other things in my head like the well -being of my dad and my mother, mine and that of my friends. But I am not universally thinking about a flag. I am busy in other things. I am big and tired, I don’t feel like fighting anymore.
News: Are you in love?
Sosa Villada: Of me, of myself (smiles). Did I fall in love with someone lately, Paulina? (Ask your manager). A little Poncho (Alfonso Herrera), but it was a purely professional and necessary love for the film. It was like love at first glance, I barely saw him the first day we met and still lasts. But the 25 that I have, one for every day of the week, they are all stable, I love you all, I love you all, I love them, I miss them, but none is an official boyfriend or a boyfriend with whom I would live with.
News: In his writing, in general, he talks about unusual issues. Is it something sought or spontaneous?
Sosa Villada: No, I need to write, I have an image or something in my head and let myself be carried away by that. It is not something that seeks consciously. Writing is one of the most beautiful works that I have because I have no commitment to any topic, it is not that I want to talk about something in particular.
