Reproducing the Imagination: On the Gender of Robots and Vampires

Both androids and vampires are creatures with a radically different reproduction to our own. Why then are they often cyphers for human gender and sexual categories? And what do they teach us about both the fiction and the reality of the many worlds that compose this one planet? The unbound possibilities of imagination?

Isadora Neves Marques (Lisbon, Portugal) is a film director, visual artist, poet, and writer. She was the Official Portuguese Representation – Portugal Pavilion at the 59th La Biennale di Venezia in 2022, and was awarded a Special Prize at the Pinchuk Future Generation Art Prize in 2022 and the Present Future Art Prize at Artissima in 2018. Her films have been screened at major film festivals, including Toronto and New York, receiving numerous awards such as the Ammodo Tiger Short Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2022. Her artworks have been exhibited globally, including the High Line, e-flux, and Anthology Film Archives (New York), Pérez Art Museum of Miami (USA), CA2M and Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), CaixaForum (Barcelona), Castello di Rivoli (Turin), Gasworks, Tate Modern Film, and Wellcome Collection (London), HOME (Manchester), Berardo Museum Collection (Lisbon), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum and Guangdong Times Museum (China), as well as at the Gwangju Biennale, Guangzhou Image Triennial, and Liverpool Biennial. She is a co-founder of the poetry press Pântano Books, through which she published her poetry collection Sex as Care and Other Viral Poems (2020). Her critical writings are published regularly in e-flux journal and other magazines, as well as in publications by MIT Press, Sternberg Press, and Verso, among others. After a decade living in New York, she is now based in Hong Kong.