"My body is not a sin": Rain Batingana on being cast as a melting statue of Jesus
Artist Cosimo Cavallaro cast trans model Rain Batingana as a life-size chocolate Jesus. On May 17, the world watches her dissolve. She wouldn't have it any other way. (Juan Jonas for Rain Batingana.)
On May 17, a trans woman's body will melt on a heated plate, streamed live to the world over the course of three hours. And it will be made of chocolate.
The piece is called Passion of the Christ: a life-size chocolate sculpture of Rain Batingana, a trans fashion model who agreed to have her body cast in silicone and her face laser-scanned for the work by artist Cosimo Cavallaro. Seven cameras will film the art performance and stream it globally as a live pay-per-view event from an undisclosed location, unfolding to the hypnotic build of Maurice Ravel's Bolero. The relentless, steady crescendo mirrors exactly what viewers are there to witness.
Cavallaro is perhaps best known for his 2007 sculpture, My Sweet Lord, a life-size chocolate rendering of Jesus Christ, removed from a New York gallery under pressure from the Catholic League. Nearly twenty years later, he's back. Same material, same iconography, different body – and a political climate that has only grown more hostile to the people this work centers.
"I prepared myself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually before I walked into that room," Rain recalls. She met Cavallaro, felt at ease, and then she lay down – arms extended, body still – and held the pose of the crucifixion for an hour and twenty minutes. What moved it from concept to something real was the moment she saw the mold. An artwork, she says, "that the world deserves to see."
That clarity of purpose is what makes Batingana's participation in this work something more than participation. She's not a subject; she's a co-author. "Nobody took my body," she says plainly. "I offered it, for a reason. The difference is consent, collaboration, and purpose. This isn't other people's argument. This is our art." In a long history of trans women's bodies conscripted as symbols for arguments never invited into, that distinction – and the insistence on it – is the whole point.
The plaster model of Rain Batingana for Cosimo Cavallaro’s upcoming “Passion of the Christ.” (Courtesy of Cosimo Cavallaro.)
Cavallaro came to Batingana with a particular kind of attention. When he says he saw timelessness in her and heard Jesus in her voice, he's careful to locate that in what he observed, not what he projected. "What I heard was empathy and her choice of words," he says. "What I saw was that she embodies all of humanity." Whether or not you share Cosimo's metaphysics, the impulse is legible: he saw someone whose presence demanded a response, and he made one.
The date of May 17 arrived, as Cavallaro tells it, by scheduling logistics rather than design. He needed a Sunday, and so he picked one. It was only afterward that he learned the date was the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia, marking the day back in 1990 when the World Health Organization (WHO) removed homosexuality from its classification of mental disorders. It also happens to fall, this year, on the same day as Rededicate 250, the Trump administration's national faith gathering at the National Mall, framed as a symbolic recommitment of the United States to God. A collision of symbolism that neither party planned, and that neither is pretending isn't there.
What they're both bracing for is less certain. Cavallaro says what he learned from the 2007 fight was that the establishment feels threatened by freedom of expression. "I can only imagine what Jesus had to endure," he asserts. "Expressing himself when all he was saying: 'the kingdom of god is within you and you are not to worship anyone or any place but yourself, honor yourself.'"
"This is why I made this Jesus a trans Jesus."
Batingana is thinking about what happens after the melt. The sculpture will dissolve over the course of three hours for the world to see, and she's already sitting with the grief in that. "Trans people live with the threat of erasure every day," she says. But she's also sitting with something that feels like triumph. "For my whole life, I've been told my body is wrong, political, debatable, disposable," she reflects. "But I believe my body is not a sin. It's not a joke. It's not a threat." She pauses – or, at least, you feel the pause in it. "The sculpture of my body will be dissolved. Chocolate Jesus will melt. But our existence shouldn't."
Cavallaro says he'll be watching the livestream alongside the audience, experiencing it for the first time himself. "I am looking forward to what it will do to me," he says.
And so, undoubtedly, are we.
