Helena Velena

Interview

• "A transgender-woman in the labyrinths of cybersex" (Rome, 14/05/1999)

Biography

As she writes of herself, Helena Velena (http://www.helenavelena.com; helena@cybercore.com) "is a (trans)gender multimedia activist, specialising in counter-information on sexuality, radically analysing and criticising the mechanisms of standardised behavioural induction within the communication processes. Born in Bologna in the not very "swingin' sixties", officially male but with a transgender psyche, Helena abandoned the faculty of Political Science, where she had already taken several exams, to begin her personal research in the everyday practice which she considered "(counter)culturally more instructive than academic studies". She lived the punk experience, becoming a well-known personality and developing the libertarian consciousness that led to a "a radical situationist critique of society, entertainment and the mechanisms and processes of media and mass communication". She founded an independent music label Multimedia Attack, that released over 80 discs of "marginal music", and established Raf Punk and Trans XXX, bands which explored forms of "alternative sexuality". Then came Cybercore which, first through videotext and later on the Internet, aimed to give cultural and communicative dignity to explicit sexuality, an experience which proved to be valuable for the elaboration of the theory of Cybersex, for which she also created her famous "tuta". For years she has contributed to numerous reviews, published articles - many on the Internet - and critical material, as well as novels. Among her more famous works: "Annihilate this week" (Synergon) and "Dal bersex al Transgender" (Castelvecchi) which, among other things, introduced to Italy the most advanced transgender and sexual identity theories in opposition to the binary, bipolar logic. In 1997 she was prosecuted, with the publisher Alberto Castelvecchi and Rodolfo de Matteis (owner of Provider '2mila8') for "Abuse of the right to criticise". She is currently working on the draft of two texts: one on sexual identity, and the other a kind of "porno-novel" on socio-communicative mutations at the end of the millennium.

She presents a radio programme (for Radio Cittā Futura) and a television programme (on Satisfaction TV - Eutelsat); she has recently staged a theatrical show (Mutazione di Sex, Transizione di Gender) and is writing a script for a cartoon strip project