Faggotification as Hacking: A Conversation Between Javier Ocampo and Jaime González Solís
Jaime González Solís (JGS): Your practice arises from the experience of inhabiting difference through having a brown body in a racist country and being a homosexual in a primordially homophobic society. This has led you to create radical responses that rehearse an antithesis to these structural violences. What tools have you found in artistic enunciation to contravene and hack these systems?
Javier Ocampo (JO): First of all, I would say that it’s a sort of personal therapy, an escape valve for all these physical and emotional sensations that somatize prejudice and discrimination, using humor to get the better of them. I’ll insult myself before someone else can do it to me, but with biting humor, and I will deploy that creative grace that situates me above cruel, clumsy, rancid insults, demonstrating that even when it comes to being humiliated I’m better at it than those who are normal and moral. This act is infused with a reflection, a demand and an enunciation of who I am. I recur to a “classless,” “cheap” aesthetics to reaffirm a certain sense of low culture, whatever is frowned upon, and elevate it to the pedestal of the “fine arts.”
JGS: This is, more than anything else, a music video. The characters and symbolic references are open to being moved by the nonstop dembow of a queer electro-reggaeton, which mixes with barks and pre-Hispanic shell instruments. How can reggaeton continue to maintain its potential for transgression, given its current assimilation into the global music industry?
JO: The genres associated with barrialization and racialization are largely taken from “low culture,” though rhythms, ensembles and atmospheres are constantly absorbed and whitewashed by new, prefabricated representatives. Even still, there will always be new groups emerging who will be criticized for their appearance and idiosyncrasies. You can take the barrio out of a musical genre and give it a new packaging designed for easy consumption, but abject creators who violate the norm will always be there to make noise and upset that hegemonically approved consumption, generating a cycle of absorption-abjection-disruption-whitewashing.
JGS: In many of your projects, you’ve referenced the precolonial Mesoamerican past to explore the complexities of the many identities that have been erased in Mexican territory through the fiction of racial and cultural mestizaje. This has been the theme of many artistic and cultural explorations, yet your work does so forcefully by examining sexual dissidence at its intersection with an antiracist perspective through a kitsch, neobaroque gaze. How do you understand the potential of rethinking the past to invoke it in the context of contemporary violence?
JO: By rehabilitating the past through a queer perspective, raising fictional possibilities outside of imposed norms, revindicating victories, humanizing historical developments, sexualizing history to flay the future, stripping the eunuch silhouette from our heroes and forefathers, one can create fictions that become new ways of addressing identity.
JGS: One of the things I most enjoy about your pieces is the game of humor and shamelessness. This register directly impacts the prejudices that may arise regarding the act of putting symbols in drag, queering references and sexualizing bodies to disarm the solemnity of prudent, traditional demands. Where do you find the motivation to articulate the transgression of these orders?
JO: When creating artistic objects, it’s impossible for me to let go of experience, the anecdotical: I speak from the gut to conceptualize it and enunciate my immediate problems. Sometimes doing something subtle can provoke the greatest scandalized reactions of Christian morality in the spectator. I like taking irrelevant facts, spaces or mementos to a strident maximalism of indignation.
