Helena Velena

Helena Velena was born in a male body in the swinging sixties in Bologna, Italy, where she was part of the psychedelic experience of the independent Radio Alice.  Next comes punk and she founded I RAF PUNK and Multimedia Attack, a label that has produced about 80 records discovering and producing, among others, CCCP Fedeli alla Linea, one of the two major indie Italian groups, as well as two records of bands from Ljubljana, specifically the punk/hardcore band U.B.R. and “Ljubav je hladnija od smrti”, the first album of the legendary Borghesia. Then she immersed herself in cyberpunk and founded Cybercore which offered various video messaging services and databases intended for different 'sexual minorities'. She was also one of the pioneers of the internet in Italy. In the 1990s, Velena formed the grounds of cybersex, presenting her famous 'overall' and definitively transitioned to Helena. She brought transgender theory to Italy, redefining its limits in terms of the philosophy of dis-identity, studying the subject both from its positive as well as negative aspect – i.e., between living in a cyber space and in “real life”. She wrote a number of books, including Dal Cybersex al Transgender, contributed to more than twenty publications, writing on counter-culture, extreme music, alternative sexuality and technologies applied to the human body. Recently she has returned to music in various projects from free jazz to vocal experimentation, from Mississippi Delta Acoustic Blues to political electronic pop. Still, the most important new aspect of her recent activity is the developing of (VA), an hybridisation of quantum physics, social anthropology, cellular brain studies and libertarian philosophy that uses science and biochemical technology to create a new social paradigm necessary to understand why left wing politics have always been a failure, and try to modify all this for the best.