Tourmaline (1983, Roxbury, Massachusetts) is an artist, writer and non-binary transgender activist working mainly with video and photography to create elaborately staged scenes that honour figures of LGBTQI+ movements and queer culture. Her work privileges a celebratory perspective, in an attempt to imagine an alternative history for Black transgender communities, often employing speculative fiction in her videos. The artist’s work is also influenced by Saidiya Hartman’s (1961) notion of ‘critical fabulation’, which privileges fiction and speculation when (re)writing marginalised histories that have been historically erased or mis-transmitted in official sources. When used in conjunction with archival material, as in Tourmaline’s work, these narrative tools have a politically empowering potential.

Pollinator (2022) employs shots of Tourmaline dressed in early 20th-century costumes while walking through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Edwardian period rooms at the Brooklyn Museum. These are interspersed with archival footage showing Marsha P. Johnson (1945-1992), an activist and performer who helped form Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and was a figure of the Stonewall uprising of 1969. In Pollinator, Tourmaline wanders in the garden and brushes against the plants, acting as a ‘pollinator’ by carrying matter on her clothes. These scenes are interrupted by home videos shot by the artist and that show her father singing, laughing, and smoking, as well as interviews with friends of Johnson, one of which holds a picture of her smiling. These images are deftly weaved in an intricate montage that repeats one leitmotiv: the flower, which appears first on Tourmaline’s headdress, then on Johnson’s flower-crown, and later is seen floating in the Hudson River during Johnson’s memorial. While centering grief, this montage acts as a joyful reminder that Johnson was a nurturing figure for gender non-conforming and trans people in New York: she was, metaphorically speaking, a ‘pollinator’. Evoking queer grief, Tourmaline’s work nevertheless privileges a celebratory perspective that connects historical queer figures with contemporary Black transgender communities – an approach that recalls what historian Robin D.G. Kelley (1962) defines as ‘freedom dreaming’.