BRIEF SUMMARY
Remembering Trauma is a transdisciplinary work situated at the threshold between photography, drawing, animation, and experimental cinema. The project seeks to reconstruct, through collective memory, the image of Trauma Disco Pub, a nightclub that shaped an entire generation of queer and trans people in Paraguay during the 1990s and 2000s.
In the absence of official records and with no possibility of accessing the original space, the work proposes a disobedient archive built through indirect means. Drawing on three-dimensional scans of existing spaces and oral testimonies from people who frequented the club, it creates an experimental audiovisual piece in which digital landscapes are traversed by a virtual camera that passes through walls as an incorporeal, metaphysical, almost ghostly presence.
Alongside the video, the installation incorporates photographs of abandoned buildings, disused nightclubs, and contemporary ruins, which are used to reconstruct a fictionalized version of Trauma. Hand-drawn illustrations of hallways, bars, dance floors, furniture, and other elements remembered by interviewees are superimposed onto these images.
The result is a hybrid, mutating collage: a spatial Frankenstein assembled from fragments, memories, and fictions. The work seeks to conjure the past into the present through emotion, desire, and delirium, giving material form to a fragmented and subjective memory in which document and fantasy, reality and virtuality, presence and absence coexist.
THE ORIGINAL SPACE
Trauma Disco Pub was an iconic nightclub that left its mark on an entire generation of Paraguay’s queer community. Founded in the early 1990s by Petunia Auad, in an Asunción emerging from the longest dictatorship in Latin American history, the venue took shape within a city undergoing a slow transition toward democracy.
Located in the heart of the historic downtown district, just meters from the National Republican Association headquarters, Trauma operated for more than two decades as one of the most popular nightclubs of its time. Although it was explicitly recognized as a gay and trans space, it consistently attracted a diverse clientele: trans people, cisgender gay men, allied heterosexuals, and curious visitors drawn to a place where the night made other forms of sociability possible.
During those years, it hosted parties, performances, and events that often spilled out onto the avenue, particularly during the Miss Trauma Pageant, which crowned the year's "female illusionist." For many, it was the site of many firsts: a first night out in the capital, a first chosen name used in public, a first kiss, a first love, but also a first experience of violence or exclusion linked to identity. It was a territory of contradictions—deeply porous, marked by both light and shadow, yet intensely alive.
Following Petunia's death in 2015, the venue underwent several unsuccessful attempts at reactivation before permanently closing in 2018. Today, the building remains abandoned, bearing a "For Sale" sign with a phone-number that never picks up: an invisible cemetery, a museum without a plaque.
Images of its interior are scarce and fragmentary, scattered across inactive social media accounts, personal photo albums, and a few scenes in two paraguayan non fiction films. In their absence, the memory of the place survives through chaotic yet evocative oral accounts, passed on by those who once inhabited it and by younger generations who reconstruct it through their imagination. It is a collective memory: partial, inherited, and incomplete.
VISUAL TREATMENT
The project is conceived as a transdisciplinary work of expanded cinema and photography, consisting of an experimental short film and a photographic installation. The short film combines 3D animation and the oral testimonies of interview participants to engage with the memory of an inaccessible space. Its methodology is based on the construction of a speculative archive, in which oral narratives serve as the foundation for the production of images that do not seek to faithfully reproduce the past, but rather to reconstruct it as a fragmented, unstable, and affective experience.
The film’s visual dispositif is built from three-dimensional scans of existing spaces, produced using accessible tools—specifically the mobile application Polycam, which allows for the generation of highly detailed models that are subsequently altered and recombined within the digital modeling and animation software Blender. This process generates hybrid landscapes that function as non-documentary spatial reconstructions, where urban fragments are rearticulated to produce a fictionalized version of the original venue. As a result, the image shifts toward a mutable condition, shaped by constant transformation and by a logic of recomposition rather than representation. Within these digital structures, a virtual camera moves through the space as an incorporeal presence, creating an immersive experience that does not follow a realist logic but instead inhabits an unstable spatiality in which boundaries are continuously reconfigured.
Still from Todas mis cicatrices se desvanecen en el viento, Carlos David Velandia Vargas & María Angélica Restrepo Guzmán (2022)
Still from Last year when the train passed by, Huang Pang-Chuan (2018)
In parallel, the photographic installation presents images of abandoned buildings, ruined spaces, and disused structures that are intervened through drawing. These photographs serve as the material support of the exhibition project and expand the universe of the short film into the physical exhibition space. The drawings, based on the testimonies of interview participants, do not function as literal illustrations but rather as a subjective activation of the archive, introducing a manual and affective dimension that directly intervenes in the photographic record.
Still from Por si me pierdo y crepito en el polvo, Belen Alvarado (2022)
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