Conversation Started

We chatted with La Chola about many things, reviewing her performance work. We went back to germinal landscapes. We talked about the supposed professionalization of an artist, about those drifts. Here is a snippet of the end of our conversation. The chat takes place in her studio, an old house that used to be a palace. She is painting some watercolors and there are bread masks hanging on the wall. We drink maté.

BETO: Your performances accompany you in personal transformations, and that allows you to think of yourself, to be part of this performative journey.

LA CHOLA: If you are asking me if I transitioned in that way, I would say yes, through action art. I see the first photo of La Chola, and I recognize myself in that image. It was hard for me to break some of my own ideas about myself and about art, to be able to say today, “I am La Chola” or “I am femininity”; maybe at that time it wasn’t clear to me. I am a romantic, my work is an intimate diary.

I turned to performance because of panic attacks.

B: Images of wounds, aspects of death, appear a lot in your work. The body endures, literally, through action, through its survival. It is a performative gesture closely linked to the sacrificial. We can also agree that deciding to become an artist, coming from a context where that is extremely unlikely to happen, charges that decision with  a lot of other meaning.

LC: Of course, chetas^[1] have been around for a while now; when you don’t have that backing up you have to invent a thousand things for yourself. It’s also a clearer decision: I have nothing to lose because I was born losing.

B: I was born lost. Now, when the market appears, everything becomes very artsy and confusing. It opens space for everything. I’m a gallery owner; I don’t speak from a moralistic point of view, I’m not interested in that simplistic criticism. In American Beauty (arteBA 2017), your gesture changes. I mean, in relation to your previous pieces. This is a gala show, La Chola dressed as a caporal, Lay’s potato chips. I saw the piece and it disturbed me, I found it crude.

LC: I’m invited to arteBA, an art fair with a whole art scene and  spectacle. I’m going to put on a show.

B: It’s your first contact with this scene and with a commercial structure. And after that: Di Tella, you join the staff of Pasto, a solo show at ARCOmadrid, exhibitions abroad, etc. That’s when you get into some interesting disjunctions regarding common agenda themes: diversities, sexual minorities, raciality, colonialism, to name a few trending topics that have been discussed for a long time in the fields of philosophy and politics, and that are making headway in art. The system begins to circulate certain profiles: artivists, brown people, gays, lesbians, trans, or even better if it’s all of the above. I call it bestial, because that is how it is handled. This is how the North always uses the South, nothing new. They wash their faces, they emulate farms in biennials, all of that. They look for certain images, in a framework of absolute cataclysm: ecological, economic, and then social. A historical shitshow. This world is unthinkable as it is, outside of an apparatus of colonial exploitation. There is no way. These interests are formed in this context, and La Chola is not naive. There is a demand for it.

LC: Have you seen Beyoncé? She is a white Black woman. I’m a fan of artists, I like to study the biographies of supermodels, musicians. Something about those life experiences and how they managed to become who they are challenges me. I give you the example of Beyoncé, who is the whitest Black woman in America. Her message has always been the same, but it has to be pop and massive, to be a bandstand, a warehouse, to have something for everybody. I learned to deal with everything involved in the art system, the agents that build a scene. Collectors, curators, iconic figures, cool people, that whole circus—which I don’t speak of disparagingly—attracts me, I find it incredible. To understand that place, but from the outside, having gone through the other.

B: I read your work with a pop key in mind. There I find a terrain that “explains” your work. It takes you out of the cliché, although I don’t think that cliché is something necessarily “bad,”, simplifying; it can be a way to reach a different language.

LC: The arteBA thing became iconic, an image. That is a super pop gesture. And not pop like Marcos López and that “Latin pop” thing, no. I do Andean pop. I can’t do a ritual at a fair, nor speak from pain. So I do a show, I return to performances with five minutes of fame.

B: And the diva appears. In your encounter with the Queen at ARCO last year, you did an operetta that I found interesting.

LC: I understand what the agenda expects, I play with that, but I’m not a product of that. Somehow, I’ve always worked with all those things.

B: Thinking in terms of being a product is depressing.

LC: I have the possibility to play, to be sarcastic. I play with the Queen; I am a queen. I knew I was going to have my performative moment when they told me about the royal visit. I thought of a thousand things to say, but I had to be hyperconcrete. That was my performance.

B: What did you say to her?

LC: The Royal House gives you a protocol of how you have to treat her; you cannot touch her. I did not comply with anything. I welcomed her and told her, “Leticia, we meet after 530 years.” She stared at me and it was a strong moment. I felt like I won. Spain is mine. A very symbolic thing, but it empowered me. Being a diva is being able to live up to it. You don’t stop being you. I am La Chola from Mendoza; my parents are still living the same way, that reality continues. I have that as an anchor. I felt like I was suddenly being given back land. Because of all of her performativity, stoic, without blinking, and those people who accompany her.

B: A ridiculous circus, incomprehensible to Latinas.

LC: Exactly, the Queen of Spain. She suddenly made a gesture of listening. I was telling her about the stand and my themes, and she was attentive: identity, gender, colonialism. I know it’s the perfect combo to end up in a biennial, but they are still things that affect me.

B: I did not say that you are an impostor. What I wonder about is how you stand in front of those demands that are, let’s say, the desire of others (the masculine gender applies here). We also know that to be politically correct is to be, literally, death. Your body of work has this interference, this baggage. For me it was interesting that you welcomed her and that you put up that paraphernalia. It was ambiguous.

LC: Literal would have been to write on my belly: “Give us back our gold.”

B: “Five centuries and still the same.”

LC: Everyone expected that.

B: I, as a white gay man, can be banal, pop, superfluous, funny, frivolous. You can’t; you have to be serious, have a discourse, be eloquent, consistent.

LC: It is true that there are other’s desires; but it is like sex, with respect to the desire of the other…

B: Me.

LC: Sure, you don’t give the other what they want, but you make them believe it. When they expect me to be a victim, I am a diva. When I make bread, I am selling the most expensive bread in Argentina. That’s the act.

B: It’s the right to be able to become: an artist, iconic, to follow a desire.

LC: I always thought that if I had the opportunity, I would speak my truths, but not in the face of other’s desire. I was discriminated against more for being brown than for being queer. I don’t feel like I’m giving anything to others; and if they want to exoticize me, well, go ahead.

B: In terms of pleasure and the right to have it.

When they expect me to be a victim, I am a diva.

LC: I love to create images and moments. I also believe in the symbolic; for me, that generates change. To leave the ghetto and be with the Queen of Spain is important. And that journey.

B: It is to sweep away a pre-coding of existence. The world does not move; if it moved, it would be something else.

LC: My mother is still a maid and my father a truck driver. It was hard for me to understand that being an artist could be a job. And I’m so ordinary that I come to the studio and try to keep a 9 to 5 work schedule, I try to make that work. When I was able to finally assimilate this as a job, I became perhaps a little more mechanical in some areas of my work. The image you portray to others is what they buy.

B: How they see you is how they treat you.

LC: That role of diva gave me a certain impunity, which is a double-edged sword. I try to use it to be able to make things. I find myself in a place given to me by the image that I invented. I have the right to arrogance. I get romantic and believe that art can change things. I get depressed when I am not creating. And I’m always thinking about where I am. When I did Il Martirio di Chola, I was self-flagellating and spiraled into a crisis. I wondered if the real Chola who is, let’s say, out there selling condiments, would empathize with this message; if it serves that community or if it’s my own reading, cold, from a different position. Because I am not the one who is out there for eight hours straight selling oregano. I have always been very critical of myself and it weighs on me every step of the way because I question myself. From when I wore a wig and was more drag, or from doing a performance and presenting it just for the sake of the show. I asked:

Is that okay? Am I not just another queer in this whole whoreocracy, taking the place and the voice of a femme, for example?

I question myself first. And before creating a piece I go over it a lot, and over time I have abandoned many of them. The performance in my work was my transition. When I realized that this image was a desire for how I wanted to see myself, I abandoned the artifice, and today it is my life. I am La Chola, and not because everyone now calls themselves trans. I don’t want to label myself, but I want to flow from femininity. Being a man never felt comfortable to me; when I was a man, I saw myself as a cake. I am part of that world, I am a person of the night, I am not one who is at home reading and thinking about what the theorists and the cool publishers write. I go back to Mendoza and I go to the sleazy bars, and I sit on the sidewalk and drink. My friends are all queers.

I don’t portray anyone, this is my body, my skin. I am not Gauguin; I am what is portrayed.

But I want to live up to everything else. To my image and my imaginary, which also speaks of alcohol, of depression, of things that happen to me and to all of us. I don’t think I have a truth, but someone who has the possibility of taking a good look at where I have to go and preparing myself for that. Because they are hostile places, and if you lose your mind, you end up wherever.

B: That fiction eats you up.

LC: Sure, but I like to play with that. Because people need it too. And because it’s good that it’s there, as simple as that.