Diego Costa

ISEA Bio(s) Available:

• ISEA2011

  Diego Costa is a Provost research fellow at the University of Southern California’s Interdivisional Media Arts & Practice PhD program and a teaching assistant in Gender Studies. His film work explores the constitutive and symptomatic relationship between queer flesh and queer psyche in essayistic self-fiction and domestic ethnography modes. In the feature-length The Parricide Sessions (2007), shown at the IFC Center in New York and international film festivals, Costa engages in psychodramatic games with his father, who is invited to play Costa’s former lovers in the film. In Project ADAM (2010) Costa probes the naked body of a “perfect faggot”being in an empty room, asking what might be lodged in his throat and celebrating the never-ending non-productivity of his existence. As an academic Costa has focused his research on digital sexual economies, gender-nonconformant children, and barebacking — through a hybridization of contemporary Queer Theory and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. He ap­proaches art prac­tice vis-à-vis method­olog­i­cal re­search as akin to the clin­i­cal labor of psy­cho­analy­sis. The rea­son and rigor nor­mally as­so­ci­ated with sci­en­tific meth­ods are, thus, im­bri­cated in rig­or­ous at­ten­tive­ness to the un­con­scious.  He asks how might we nur­ture a nec­es­sary dis­tance from art­work and the­ory so that we can lis­ten to the un­con­scious for the pur­poses of de­vel­op­ing a symp­to­ma­tol­ogy of the re­search (and the re­searcher)? Costa will dis­cuss the im­por­tance of psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cal lit­er­acy as a means to un­set­tle any kind of method re­gard­ing the human ex­pe­ri­ence.  Screen­ing ex­am­ples of his ex­per­i­men­tal film and in­stal­la­tion work, he ex­plores how al­low­ing the un­con­scious to take shape through art, cou­pled with a well-honed abil­ity to read it uti­liz­ing the sym­bolic lan­guage of La­can­ian psy­cho­analy­sis, can con­tribute to the for­ma­tion of a new re­search par­a­digm where the re­searchers in­clude their own de­sire among their ob­jects of study.