Luca Donnini, No camera allowed, il Gender Club a Roma, Santini&Donnini editions, 2023

In 1998 the Gender Club was born in Rome, the first openly transgender cultural association in Italy and in Europe. Purpose: to spread transgender culture and sexuality, in order to create spaces where everyone is what they want to be, without pre-established genders, roles or sexes. Luca Donnini has been a friend of Gender for some time, but above all with the patron and maître à penser: Klaus Mondrian who has always made available to him, as well as his Mondrian Suite art gallery, also the club whose hard core destiny he has always contaminated with theatrical and artistic forays. This book was born from the experience during the installation: GENDER.  The Exhibition which in 2014 on a weekly basis grew in one season, invading the whole club. Armed with a disposable 35 mm camera, Donnini crosses the border of the last temple of heterosexual transgression. Before starting to fire the flash, he would stick the 10x15s on the dark walls of the club where they had been taken the previous time. The photos were exhibited paired, to build, mix, break, to see something, interpreting the title of the installation. Donnini is a wild soul who tries to mix and merge with his subject, probably fueled by his own camaraderie. His perspective on the state of the Transgender and Transvestite Nation is humorous, generous, fascinated, but never condescending.