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The film The Day We Went To See Him Dead (2023) follows the members of the collective on their trip to see the deceased Pope Benedict XVI lying in state in St Peter's Basilica. As transgender people, they claimed their place in a baroque ritual that had historically excluded them.

Feel Good Cooperative is an artistic collective founded by Pauline Curnier Jardin with the researcher and urban planner Serena Olcuire, the photographer and sex worker Alexandra Lopez and a group of Columbian transgender sex workers in Rome during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Initially, Curnier Jardin bought the sex workers’ drawings for the price of a ‘trick’, i.e. a sexual service. What began as an initiative to offer sex workers work and an income has grown into a long-term artistic collective. Curnier Jardin sees the sex workers as artists who possess a specific expertise of their own in their use of the body, light, make-up and costumes. Feel Good Cooperative is developing its own artistic practice encompassing performances and films, graphic works, sculptures and installations. Since it was founded, the cooperative’s work has been exhibited in Rome, Berlin, Genoa, Bonn, Cologne and New York.

 "The subject of my work is not minorities, but the process of coming together, becoming a collective and developing shared expertise,” Curnier Jardin says.

Credits:
Starring: Alexandra Lopez, Juiliana Mira, Gilda Star, Diana Veruzcar Martinez
Direction: Pauline Curnier Jardin
Executive Producer: Colin Ledoux
Camera: Pauline Curnier Jardin, Colin Ledoux, Viola Adriano, Georgia René-Worms, Alexandra Lopez, Juliana Mira, Gilda Star, Diana Veruzcar Martinez, Martina Silvi
Editing sound and image: Colin Ledoux
Field recordings: Pauline Curnier Jardin
Special Thanks: Florence Mangin, Ambassadrice de France au Saint Siège, Martina Silvi, Georgia René-Worms
© Pauline Curnier Jardin & Feel Good Cooperative, 2023
Courtesy of the artist and ChertLüdde, Berlin and Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam