Scissor Beats Chainsaw

The Argentine writer Ana Longoni is known for her work on art and politics in Latin America. She is also a transfeminist activist who has participated in many protests — including against the neoliberal austerity measures that caused poverty to spike to over 50% after President Javier Milei took office in 2023, and against the genocide in Palestine. 

Born in La Plata, Argentina, Longoni spent much of her childhood exiled in Peru due to her father’s activism. Argentina was governed by a military dictatorship that lasted from 1976 until 1983 and disappeared an estimated 30,000 people. When Longoni’s family could return, they moved to Buenos Aires because La Plata felt rife with the “ghosts” of friends who had been disappeared. She studied literature and became fascinated by dadaism, surrealism, and the political and artistic avant-gardes of Europe and Argentina.

Earlier this year, she helped to organize a remarkable protest that galvanized millions against Milei’s Trump-like targeting of the LGBTQ+ community. Milei had used the stage of the Davos Economic World Forum to equate “gender ideology” with pedophilia. In response, Longoni and five thousand others showed up for a public meeting and decided to mobilize a march under the slogan: “There are only two genders: fascist and anti-fascist.” On February 1, over a million people gathered in Buenos Aires; another million marched in protests across Argentina and the world. The streets teemed with art: hand-painted banners, stencilled t-shirts, revolutionary videos projected onto high-rises, and pink “Make Argentina Gay Again” baseball caps.

Longoni’s scholarship and activism exemplify a tradition of political art driven by the collective memory of the horrors of authoritarianism. As the U.S. and other countries become less democratic, the Argentine tradition has a lot to teach us about how to resist. 

I recently spoke with Longoni about the current state of protest in Argentina, art as a tool to imagine “new concepts of life,” and what she calls the “internal fascism” plaguing the left. —Vera Carothers

This interview is being copublished with elDiarioAr. It has been edited for length and clarity.

VERA CAROTHERS Art and politics have been closely tied in Argentina since at least the 1960s. Have there been breaks in that lineage or has it been constant? 

ANA LONGONI Well, first I would say that the history of art and politics in Argentina goes back to the early 20th century. In 1914, the first art and politics group in Argentina was founded, called Los Artistas del Pueblo (Artists of the People), and its members were anarchists. There were many artists linked to the Communist Party, such as Antonio Berni, Lino Enea Spilimbergo, and Demetrio Urruchúa, in the 1930s, who tried, for example, to experiment with muralism. Since there was already a military dictatorship in the 1930s, what they did was create large-format paintings that could be carried as murals for political events. In the 1940s, there was the whole concrete art collective, who were also communist militants and were expelled from the Communist Party. What we have are cycles, fluctuations, moments of greater intensity. There are historical moments that we could also call turning points. These are moments when certain urgent historical conditions cause artists, playwrights, or writers to turn to political intervention. One could think, for example, of events such as the Vietnam War or the assassination of Che Guevara. Today, the genocide taking place in Gaza has led many people to take a stand and change their mode of political intervention. I think of it as a heartbeat: a thing you sometimes hear more intensely and that sometimes recedes, hides, and vibrates again. 

VC What does art contribute to activism?

AL Unlike the modernist idea of art, which insists on the idea of originality and authorship, activism moves in other ways. It moves from the collective, it often moves from anonymity, it often does not claim what it does as art. It does not present in artistic spaces, in galleries, in museums, but rather in the street. But at the same time, it feeds on traditions, language, and knowledge that come from art. That’s what I call the toolbox. There are practices that have already been tried in other contexts; we can reinvent them when we need them. Art is a component that transforms, that makes visible, that modifies the more traditional ways of occupying the streets with its carefree attitude, its creativity, its colorfulness, its festivity, its drums, its elements of Carnaval. 

VC I find it striking that each protest I go to here includes performance and visual art. 

AL It’s because of history, because of genealogy. The activists of the ’90s, for example, the women who formed the Grupo Arte Callejero or GAC (Street Art Group) were trained by Juan Carlos Romero and Julio Flores. Juan Carlos Romero is a key artist in the political art of the 1970s, and Julio Flores was one of the creators of the Siluetazo in the 1980s. That element of knowledge transmission is key to understanding the scene’s contemporary vitality. It doesn’t come out of nowhere — it’s been brewing for a long time.

VC You’ve also spoken about art as a place of refuge and collective care. 

AL Yes, sometimes it has to do with insolence, with going a little beyond the usual slogans, with a certain playfulness. I’m very committed to forms of political imagination that can emerge in that collective willingness to try out other ways of being in the street. It makes me think of the feminist movement. Specifically, that long night in 2018 waiting to see what would happen with the abortion legalization law the first time it was voted on, when it was voted down. Throughout that long night, people stayed up together, sustaining each other, all together without letting go. 

I also think of collectives like Serigrafistas Queer who create t-shirts. Today I saw a photo of a t-shirt for two people; two people could fit inside the t-shirt and hug each other. Wearing that garment is a way of declaring something. There is a Peruvian collective called Los Bestias (The Beasts), which in the 1980s spoke of mediocre utopia, and the idea was a utopia that does not wait for ideal conditions, but transforms and makes do with what it has at hand, with the remains of garbage, with the cardboard that people throw away. And that is also a very Latin American trait — not waiting for ideal conditions, but rather inventing ways of subsistence and survival despite deprivation, despite precariousness, despite the lack of resources. 

VC It also brings up this question of whether art can actually change things or not. 

AL I think a lot about Roberto Jacoby, who said in 1968 that avant-garde art has to invent new concepts of life. If art is capable of inventing those new concepts of life, those new forms of community, those new forms of imagination, then it gives us forms, it gives us words, it gives us tools. As we said before, it also transforms politics. Art is capable of shaking up certain conventions, certain clichés, certain very rigid, very disciplined political rituals, and imposing, or at least opening up the possibility of other forms of politics that are more insolent, more rebellious, more fresh.

VC How would you characterize the current state of protest in Argentina? 

AL It’s a very difficult context. Since the beginning of Milei’s government, they have been trying to instill a lot of fear in the streets. Today I read that, so far in 2025, there have been as many people injured in demonstrations as all of last year, which was already a very repressive context. And yet, since Milei took office, there have been many massive marches. For example, the university marches in 2024 were very large and attended by many people who usually don’t go to marches. And this year, on February 1, there was the massive antifascist LGBT march, which I helped to organize together with the Columna Mostri and the Asamblea Antifascista.

VC How did the February 1st march come about? 

AL In January this year, when Milei spoke at the Davos Economic World Forum and launched his threat of extermination against the LGBT community, there was a very immediate reaction in the community. We began to circulate a call for a community meeting. It was amazing how many people from different groups showed up, from unions to political parties to LGBT federations. I had never been to such a massive assembly. It exceeded our expectations in every way. That assembly, which was on January 25, voted to march on February 1. So, it was a dizzying week in which we threw ourselves into the work madly, to guarantee such concrete things as negotiating with the police and city authorities to let us march, organizing the columns, the trucks, the sound system. In the end, an estimated two million people marched all over the country and also abroad. It was an outsized reaction.

VC Along those lines, could you describe the action you helped organize a few months later, on March 7th, Lesbian Visibility Day?

AL Well, the Antifascist Graphic Art Action Committee engaged in a form of street intervention that I found beautiful and very powerful. People brought images, which could be handmade, photocopies, drawings, texts, whatever. We mixed paste and in ten minutes, 100 people were pasting their art on the wall in front of the Lezama Park auditorium, turning it into a mural of lesbian visibility with the slogan “Scissor Beats Chainsaw.” The slogan has to do with positioning lesbian eroticism, i.e. scissoring, as a counterpoint to the destructive austerity measures that Milei is enacting such as closing state agencies, massive layoffs of public workers, reducing budgets, and destroying the country’s public sector. Argentine science is in a state of absolute emergency today. In that context, “Scissor Beats Chainsaw” uses a play on words to reclaim eroticism and collective care as tools to confront the extreme individualism proposed by Milei’s libertarian government. 

VC You mentioned Milei’s decimation of funding for scientific research. Can you describe that beautiful sci-fi-inspired action that happened at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council building in May, resulting in a viral video?

AL We took advantage of the fact that the Netflix series The Eternaut had had a lot of visibility. The Eternaut comes from a comic strip that was created in the 1950s and 1960s, and whose author, Héctor Germán Oesterheld, was disappeared. It’s inevitable to think of The Eternaut — with its central metaphor of Buenos Aires being ravaged by poisonous snow and an invasion — as a metaphor for what we are experiencing today. So it was the initiative of Andrea Gamarnik, who is well known for her work on the prevention and diagnosis of COVID. And she said, well, why don’t we do an Eternaut march with the scientific community? Several laboratories and research institutes began to organize. We produced Eternaut-style gas masks, some more sophisticated than others, and we set out from our locations with the support of many photographers and journalists who came to cover the events. Thousands of people gathered, thousands of Eternauts. 

It was an important march because never before had so many people gathered at the scientific hub. In general, the scientific sector finds it very difficult to take to the streets. 

VC I wanted to ask you about the feminist movement. That was such a mobilizing force here in the 2010s. What’s going on now? 

AL I return to the idea of fluctuations and that image of a heart, of that which beats, of that which ebbs and flows. Feminism is one of the great enemies of this government. It is being attacked all the time, and that is permeating society as well. So, I think we are at a moment, if you will, of ebb — which does not mean that there have not been enormous achievements by the feminist movement, the transfeminist movement, and by all gender-related struggles in recent decades. These are unprecedented achievements that must be defended, such as the Gender Identity Law and the Marriage Equality Law, among others.

I would also say that there is a mark of the times that I call “internal fascism.” Within the movements themselves, there’s a certain dynamic of tension, confrontation, and exacerbation of differences. There is the debate around sex work, there are abolitionists, there are TERFs, there are certain forms of punitive feminism that draw heavily on the MeToo movement. Feminism is not unanimous; it is a movement with many internal debates. And today, those debates — which at one point may not have been irreconcilable positions, but rather generated a front to win the right to abortion, for example — seem more fragmented. I don’t know if calling it internal fascism is too extreme, but in a context of so much political tension, so much persecution, so many insults, so much intolerance, that seeps in and somehow establishes a logic. That’s what I call internal fascism. Instead of taking care of each other and assuming that, even though we have different positions, we can be allies in the face of this attack, what we see is a lot of fragmentation.