What you don't know in the beginning
I am a small house,
an open window, tulle curtains.
Inside? Two weary men rest.
Plastered walls, closed windows,
impressions of faces watching—
shadows affixed with eyes.
I am a pair of eyes
affixed onto a small house
with calm, dandy care: watching
the world. Tulle curtains
as phantoms dancing in windows.
I am a pair of men at rest.
Two animals who love, they rest,
they desire, feel fury in their eyes.
Like the other strangers beyond windows,
they, together, are a small house.
Passing by, they raise dark curtains
off of the burdened eyes watching.
A shop T.V., nobody watching.
Glancing over, removing my rest
for a moment. These tulle curtains—
a layer of grace over my eyes—
tear lightly. Into my house,
gross politics seep into windows.
I am a body covered in open windows
from which my spirits are watching
life. Floor to ceiling, in this house,
stacks of delicate pages rest.
Ancestral ghosts before my eyes
billow as tattered tulle curtains.
I am a tapestry—patchwork curtain—
hanging solemn before heavens windows.
So few years in these eyes
yet a lifetime spent worth watching.
I am a dust covered bible at rest
on a handmade shelf in a small house.
I am a pair of eyes
after a busy day, closing to rest.
At last, glorious, I am a small house.
When you thought no one was looking, the Bayou was there
What memories does the water hold?
Liquid as old as the earth, vapor that whispers long-kept secrets.
Veins running through the city.
Running through your body.
Running, rushing.
Everything is alive.
S Rodriguez is a Texas-based interdisciplinary artist, curator, and writer. Their work most often explores the technology of queerness in the past, present, and future, and the possibilities of bodies - digital, physical, and linguistic.
Rodriguez has performed or exhibited at various institutions statewide, including Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, the Blaffer Art Museum, the Austin Public Library, DiverseWorks, Lawndale Art Center, the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and more. They have received multiple awards via the Idea Fund, Alternate Roots, Common Field, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
SATURNO (El salón de espejos)
SATURNO (El salón de espejos) is the story of a mythical figure who hides in the mirrors of Gay Bars in the center of Bogotá.
Made in collaboration with Javier Vaquero Ollero, Gerardo Rosero, Juan Echeverry, Gärtner, Barbara Pohlenz, Sepulveda, Cristian guerrero, Santiago Sepulveda, David Gómez. Text by Lechedevirgen Trimegisto.
"Saturno was old like time. His whereabouts are currently unknown. Saturno has had various names throughout the history of the world: Ahir, Sapphire, Falahr, Anastasio, and Paracelsus. Even Don Juan; el mismo Don Juan de Castañeda. I knew him as Melchior. Known as the great magician Melchior Sortiban de Java or simply the magician Melchior, he has always been surrounded by a mystery too difficult to unveil without fear of his essence vanishing in our hands like a fist of sand. Many things are said about him. It is said that he was over 100 years old. That he was a hermaphrodite because he had breasts, a penis, and a vagina, bringing him closer to a primordial creature like the figure of the androgenous alchemicist or the story of Tiresias, punished with different sex but rewarded with the gift of divination. He could talk to animals, was born on a boat off the coast of the island of Java in Indonesia, and had extensive knowledge in the arts of shamanism, sleight of hand, herbalism, and occultism. He could speak several languages and transport himself over very long distances despite his advanced age. He has eyes that change color more than four times a day; they are brown, then gray, then black, then blue, then green, and then one gray and one blue like David Bowie, and then the cycle begins again. He is a strange guy with strange things. He is covered by a layer of leather that is nothing more than an elephant's ear. Yes, his cape is nothing but a bull elephant's ear. He carries rare objects in a leather bag: pendulums, strings, bones, stones, crystals, amber, herbs, hair, nails, a stuffed rat's foot, and a tiny sharp Hindu knife. Saturno, or Melchora, was the one who revealed to me the secrets that are hidden in the Bermuda triangle between quantum physics, Brujeria, and performance art. Secrets I can't reveal here."
Houses without roofs and walls, but with diverse cable connections
A system of rigid singular transverse wires bent into flattened helicoid forms and slotted together meet the corresponding kinks in the next member and create a strong sheet material: unrollable wall, infinite edge. The individual spirals’ linearity lends the material to various diverse developable geometric forms though it is rarely deployed. Textile alchemy metal-head remix steampunk. This performance is one of a series of engagements with chain-link and its material potentials undertaken by Harris Chowdhary. The objective is to facilitate the expression of the material’s tectonics, moods, and poetics, locating within the same rigidity and regularity that makes it such an esteemed governess the potential for something beyond border. The hand-woven sheet of full spirals is actuated by a system of sensor-motivated cables floating through distortions and choreographies, both sensitive and indifferent. By inviting the fence to dance, one hopes it may lead us towards escape.
Harris Chowdhary is preoccupied by manipulation, deception, and coercion on every scale. His practice is concerned with investigating the origins of these deceptions, their ultimate aims, and the outputs that allow them to reproduce. Through encounters with patterns in monumentality, collective obsession, memetics, histories of technological development, and political history, he works across media to investigate the tensions that hold us in our binds. He has studied political economy and architecture in Dallas, Texas, Cambridge, Mass., and Lahore, Pakistan, and participated in artists residencies and fellowships in Guayllabamba, Ecuador, Mexico City, Mexico, and Lucknow, India.
Lacrima Christi Scored Live by Nudo and Desvelada
“It was by making LACRIMA CHRISTI that I realized at all levels, the fact of belonging to two cultures, of carrying two opposite bloods in my veins.”
Teo Hernández’s film is a portrait of a fractured self clutching onto a shadow world of half-remembered myths. Fusing biblical tropes with psychedelic camerawork, Lacrima Christi rubs the mundane and mythological worlds together until they breakdown into hypnotic pulsations of light and movement. These pulsations build into a frenetic energy that dilates the mind’s eye and induce a trance-like state.
Hernandez embraced states of delirium at his screenings, improvising music and obsessively altering the projector speed to further disorient the audience. Unapologetically mobile, impermanent, and mutable Hernández offers a site to think about Queerness in relation to an unfixed place.
Nudo is a psychic handshake/brain trust between Joaquin Tenorio and Eric Hernandez. Hailing from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuaha Mexico and Eagle Pass, Texas USA, respectively. Their music was initially birthed from daisy-chained 4 tracks, countless youtube pages being run through MaxMSP, hours of talking about border slang, cholo memes, niche Norteño also-rans, industrial and state mass manipulation, and the bittersweet reality of growing up on either side of the notorious TexMex border.
Desvelada is a DJ, visual artist, and occasional producer with a background in choir originally from Mexico City. She has recently relocated to NYC after growing up in Texas and finishing a degree in film. The focus of her music is to invoke nostalgic ideations, and her sets reflect her attitude of intentional disorder and are genre blenders. Collaborating with Paris-based producer Sprælle with the track “Quieto” where she recalls a memory of an incident where a man punched a window and bled throughout her house. Desvelada has exhibited her visual work and guest mixes with the Montréal based radio station N10.as.
[CANCELED] SATURNO (El salón de los espejos)
SATURNO (El salón de espejos) is the story of a mythical figure who hides in the mirrors of Gay Bars in the center of Bogotá.
Made in collaboration with Javier Vaquero Ollero, Gerardo Rosero, Juan Echeverry, Gärtner, Barbara Pohlenz, Sepulveda, Cristian guerrero, Santiago Sepulveda, David Gómez. Text by Lechedevirgen Trimegisto.
"Saturno was old like time. His whereabouts are currently unknown. Saturno has had various names throughout the history of the world: Ahir, Sapphire, Falahr, Anastasio, and Paracelsus. Even Don Juan; el mismo Don Juan de Castañeda. I knew him as Melchior. Known as the great magician Melchior Sortiban de Java or simply the magician Melchior, he has always been surrounded by a mystery too difficult to unveil without fear of his essence vanishing in our hands like a fist of sand. Many things are said about him. It is said that he was over 100 years old. That he was a hermaphrodite because he had breasts, a penis, and a vagina, bringing him closer to a primordial creature like the figure of the androgenous alchemicist or the story of Tiresias, punished with different sex but rewarded with the gift of divination. He could talk to animals, was born on a boat off the coast of the island of Java in Indonesia, and had extensive knowledge in the arts of shamanism, sleight of hand, herbalism, and occultism. He could speak several languages and transport himself over very long distances despite his advanced age. He has eyes that change color more than four times a day; they are brown, then gray, then black, then blue, then green, and then one gray and one blue like David Bowie, and then the cycle begins again. He is a strange guy with strange things. He is covered by a layer of leather that is nothing more than an elephant's ear. Yes, his cape is nothing but a bull elephant's ear. He carries rare objects in a leather bag: pendulums, strings, bones, stones, crystals, amber, herbs, hair, nails, a stuffed rat's foot, and a tiny sharp Hindu knife. Saturno, or Melchora, was the one who revealed to me the secrets that are hidden in the Bermuda triangle between quantum physics, Brujeria, and performance art. Secrets I can't reveal here."
SATURNO (El salón de espejos)
SATURNO (El salón de espejos) is the story of a mythical figure who hides in the mirrors of Gay Bars in the center of Bogotá.
Made in collaboration with Javier Vaquero Ollero, Gerardo Rosero, Juan Echeverry, Gärtner, Barbara Pohlenz, Sepulveda, Cristian guerrero, Santiago Sepulveda, David Gómez. Text by Lechedevirgen Trimegisto.
"Saturno was old like time. His whereabouts are currently unknown. Saturno has had various names throughout the history of the world: Ahir, Sapphire, Falahr, Anastasio, and Paracelsus. Even Don Juan; el mismo Don Juan de Castañeda. I knew him as Melchior. Known as the great magician Melchior Sortiban de Java or simply the magician Melchior, he has always been surrounded by a mystery too difficult to unveil without fear of his essence vanishing in our hands like a fist of sand. Many things are said about him. It is said that he was over 100 years old. That he was a hermaphrodite because he had breasts, a penis, and a vagina, bringing him closer to a primordial creature like the figure of the androgenous alchemicist or the story of Tiresias, punished with different sex but rewarded with the gift of divination. He could talk to animals, was born on a boat off the coast of the island of Java in Indonesia, and had extensive knowledge in the arts of shamanism, sleight of hand, herbalism, and occultism. He could speak several languages and transport himself over very long distances despite his advanced age. He has eyes that change color more than four times a day; they are brown, then gray, then black, then blue, then green, and then one gray and one blue like David Bowie, and then the cycle begins again. He is a strange guy with strange things. He is covered by a layer of leather that is nothing more than an elephant's ear. Yes, his cape is nothing but a bull elephant's ear. He carries rare objects in a leather bag: pendulums, strings, bones, stones, crystals, amber, herbs, hair, nails, a stuffed rat's foot, and a tiny sharp Hindu knife. Saturno, or Melchora, was the one who revealed to me the secrets that are hidden in the Bermuda triangle between quantum physics, Brujeria, and performance art. Secrets I can't reveal here."
Sperm Bank
I stare at the window and notice through a thin gap between the curtain and the glass, there’s snow falling. The backyard light beams yellowish over the flakes. Behind that there’s black pines and behind that, I bet there’s is someone buried or maybe parts of someone ripped apart and scattered around. A face rotting away. No eyes now, just teeth. The corpses cock already vanishing under the mud.
….
That same night we all schedule our uses of the shower. I volunteer to go last. I need to step, feel, scrub, scrape and slurp on that shower floor after all the older boys have used it. I not only have my last meal by teething the bottom teals but I also tongue the bathroom rug. Up and down, I comb the tiny hairs of the fabric with a quite nightly passion.
F. Tibiezas Dager, Sperm Bank
F. Tibiezas Dager (Guayaquil, 1997) is a writer and a visual artist based in Lima. Her work analyzes the aesthetic economies of trauma and the intersections between harm and desire. Her main interest when working with media archive is the treatment of the criminal event and forms of rehabilitation. She is the author of the poetry collection Encuentros Homosexuales con Pancho Jaime (Recodo.press, 2021)
What dreams may come
Rabit (Eric Burton) is a storyteller documenting the American South primarily through sound. His latest project, "What dreams may come," is a collaborative multimedia record set for a 2022 release. The project will unfold through a series of exhibitions, actions, performances, and album releases throughout the year. Select collaborators include Björk, Arca, Elysia Crampton, House Of Kenzo, & Drew McDowall. RABIT has presented original music in venues such as CaixaForum in Barcelona, Spain, the Laboral Theatre in Gijón, Spain, MoMA PS1 in New York, Center MARS in Moscow, Art Basel Miami, and Südpol in Luzern, Switzerland.
Archive
La tierra tuya es una digna sepultura
On June 28, 2021 beginning at 4:30 AM the Houston-based performance group Los Performeros (Antonia, Jessica Carolina González, Veronica Gaona, Erick Zambrano, and Junior Fernandez) presented La Tierra Tuya Es Una Digna Sepultura during which, by virtue of collective memory, history, and land, a once solidly engineered parking lot transmuted into past, present, and future forms of itself (excavated to find the breath of its haunting). The resulting development served as a vector signaling a sanctified space of resistance—probing capitalist and colonialist erasure under the guise of progress and expansion.
Jessica Carolina González is a multidisciplinary contemporary artist from Houston, TX. She has a BFA in Photography and Digital Media, BA in World Cultures and Literatures: Global Modernity Studies, and Spanish Minor from the University of Houston. In her work, González utilizes traditional archives and the archives of her bloodline, to explore conflicts of representation in a post-colonial landscape. Her work has been featured at Art League Houston as part of Latino Art Now Here Ahora! and Día de los Muertos Community Altar: De Amor, Nadie se Muere, for Pangea World Theatre in Minneapolis, MN. González was a Houston finalist for the Artadia Award and has produced translating work for Ediciones Vigía in Matanzas, Cuba.
Erick Zambrano is an artist working in Sculpture and Performance art. He earned a BFA from Midwestern State University and his MFA from the University of Houston. He collects and extracts materials to make objects, and enact participatory performance rituals set out to open new ways of relating through making and embodiment. In order to ignite the creation of new ways of understanding for the future while negating the colonized-capitalist myth that is socially imposed. Taking one world apart to make another.
Verónica Gaona’s interdisciplinary research-based practice explores characteristics of diaspora such as transnationality and impermanence to critique traditional approaches to memorialization. through digital media, sculpture, and installation her work confronts local and national systems of power to better understand contradictory forces across international borders. Gaona has been in residence at Desert Unit for Speculative Territories in Marfa, Texas and The Saint-Nazaire School of Art in Nantes, France.
To excavate is to destroy
A team of bacteria burglars intrudes on the former Mary’s Naturally building. The burglars are not interested in breaking inside the building but instead “stealing” the microorganisms living on its surface -- they touch and feel the architectural space, the walls, lamp posts, and concrete, then transfer the bacteria and fungi picked up into the Petri purses. A transfer of memories through microorganisms by touch from public architectural space and cultivated. The bacteria burglars obscure their identities by wearing handmade masks illuminating nahuālli or shapeshifting shamans and spirits amongst the grounds of the former gay bar.
Angel Lartigue is a curatorial and artistic researcher born and raised in Houston Texas. Lartigue's work explores the relationship between the body and land through the use of "putrefaction" matter as raw material. This concentration has led her to experimenting with archaeological processes of decomposition into artworks, incorporating fungi, insects, and even odors captured during fieldwork, including research training in human remains recovery at Texas’ Forensic Anthropology Center, “body farm”, in 2018. Designer of 2017 label book, La ciencia avanza pero yo no is part of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Hirsch Library rare books collection. Recommended by Italian curator, Eugenio Viola, Lartigue was accepted as honorary research fellow to artistic laboratory, SymbioticA, part of the University of Western Australia Perth for 2020. Lartigue is a participant at the international conference Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science 2020 part of the University of Applied Arts Vienna Austria where she presented her first essay, Science At The Club: Putrefaction As An Artistic Medium. Lartigue has given lectures and exhibited at Station Museum of Contemporary Art (HTX), the University of Texas at Austin, The Latinx Project NYU, The Holocaust Museum Houston, USC Roski School of Art and Design, The Charla Fund part of the US Latinx Art Forum 2021 and awarded through The Andy Warhol Foundation for The Visual Arts for both 2021 and 2022.
Parábola II
If architecture functions as a stage through which knowledge, dominion, procreation, and immortality are formalized — inducing our movements and ways of living; our habitation scripted and choreographed; how, then, can the body render it transmutable and fluid? Could the anal cavity, with its capacities for dilatation, contraction, and recovery, be the most propitious place for this mutable exchange? Could the anus interrupt and divert the concrete and dilate the foundational columns? Could the anus sustain an entire architecture? Could the anus sustain an entire architecture? Bear the weight of our systems?
Parábola II is part of a series of ongoing actions created by artists Juan Betancurth and Alejandro Penagos. The objective of these actions is to propose experiments that exist within a specific time and space that is agreed between the artists, the curator and the space itself. Instead of focusing on a finalized piece, Betancurth and Penagos artistic process seeks to formalize their dialogues and sketches in front of a public. Risk, vulnerability, and experimentation are important elements when presenting their actions. Their collaborative work is based on mutual trust and respect for each other's practices, the combination of Betancurth's interest in sculptural objects alongside Penagos' bodywork produces a broad and highly meditative visual experience.
For, without architecture, there would be no stonewall; without architecture, there would be no “brick”, the artists have chosen to work with the sonic elements of a bell, the bell functions like a call or an alert that invites people to congregate. Betancurth and Penagos appropriate the bell as a common symbol within many cultures to gather the voices that have been and continue to be systematically silenced.
Juan Betancurth's mixed media works act as loaded metaphors, provoking the viewer's intimate desires to rise to the surface as they decode the potential function embedded within each object. Each object holds a different meaning, whether relating to restriction, liberation, or symbols of power. Betancurths works are presented as meticulously detailed and often immersive installations. Betancurth’s work has been shown internationally in countries including the USA, Poland, Germany, Finland, Czech Republic, North Korea, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, among others.
Alejandro Penagos is an interdisciplinary artist interested in fictional ethnographies, neighborhood taxonomies, and the ability of the body to become an object or a space. Penagos is co-founder of the House of Tupamaras and Streetjizz collective.
Science at the Club: Putrefaction as an artistic medium
Science at the Club explores the architecture of the nightclub space as a nucleus for queer testimony, relating it to a judiciary courtroom well. This performance challenges legal doctrines of forensic identification and the binary of life and death, by transforming biological and forensic material into ephemeral essences within the performance of the dance floor. Divided into case studies surrounding my performances at nightclubs, research courses taken in human remains recovery, and visits to various burial sites of South Texas. I pull from a variety of interdisciplinary studies relating to queer death theory, building on José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of “disidentification” in relation to the human corpse, racial politics in science, and the biological arts in a nightclub context. Science at the Club creates a catalyst platform challenging racial and scientific histories of the body and land within the current U.S. political climate, while exploring questions of resurrection and disintegration with a focus on the language of forensics and identity.
Science at the Club: Putrefaction as an Artistic Medium was part of Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence in Art & Science Conference 2020 at the University of Applied Arts Vienna Austria and was later presented at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, TX as part of without architecture, there would be no Stonewall; without architecture there would be no "brick" in 2021.
Plight of the Albatross
Connie Fu (of performative duo yFFy) plays the Portal of Answers in Plight of the Albatross, a multimedia performance braiding together historic queer Houston-based publications, stories of self-discovery, and Asian diaspora, and questions about connection and community in the present. What begins as a one-person play expands to include the audience in a collective melodrama. The whole performance functions as a ritual, during which the original intent of local print publications to disseminate news, issue warnings, and connect members of the queer community and subcommunities is brought forth as a collection of sentient specters.
Connie Fu is an interdisciplinary artist whose work brings sound, craft, and performance together to express metamorphosis, spiraling journeys, and twin loves for order and disorder. She is originally from Michigan and is fairly nomadic, calling many places home. She's interesed in supporting artists of all kinds in sustaining and nourishing their life and creative practice. Connie's performance work has recently been presented at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art (Houston), Maelstrom Collaborative Arts (Cleveland), Cherry Street Pier (Philadelphia), and La MaMa Theatre (New York).
Para aquellos que no regresan en vida, siempre está la muerte
In Para aquellos que no regresan en vida, siempre está la muerte, Verónica Gaona stages a truck burnout on a white Ford F-150 she was left with at the death of her uncle. The artist drove it from Brownsville, TX, to Houston, TX, having it pass for the first time the United States Border Patrol interior checkpoints the vehicle’s late owner was never able to travel across. Gaona’s traslado or transfer recalls the remitting of migrant cadavers over long distances for burial in the homeland, thus problematizing the ambiguity of presence and belonging produced by continual but restricted migration.
Verónica Gaona’s interdisciplinary research-based practice explores characteristics of diaspora such as transnationality and impermanence to critique traditional approaches to memorialization. through digital media, sculpture, and installation her work confronts local and national systems of power to better understand contradictory forces across international borders. Gaona has been in residence at Desert Unit for Speculative Territories in Marfa, Texas and The Saint-Nazaire School of Art in Nantes, France.
Aesthetics of Mobility
Aesthetics of Mobility is a conversation series between artist/partners Najja Moon and GeoVanna Gonzalez taking place in their mobile project space “Living life as practice”. Part-time exhibition space for “Supplement Projects”, full-time living experiment, the artist will discuss visibility and the politics of living via their inspirations, annoyances, influences, and goals in a dialogue meant to engage friends, strangers, and colleagues alike.
For without architecture, there would be no Stonewall; without architecture; there would be no "brick", the artists focused on conversations around who is left out of the historic narrative of the gay bar, the nature of fleeting, femme centric party spaces, to and the endless and transformative potential of an occupied box truck. Here, the nomadic nature of the artists’ project space conceptualizes what a home could be in a speculative re-configuring of ‘Mary’s, Naturally’, as a more inclusive, queer, black and brown bar for contemporary times. An artist’s rendering of what could be.
Najja Moon is a Miami based artist, born and raised in Durham, North Carolina. Her practice is centered on the idea that art is utilitarian. An amalgamation of practicalities that improve her life; design and language, cultural responsibility and community, her visual arts practice uses drawing and text to explore the intersections of queer identity, the body and movement, black culture and familiar relations both personal and communal.
Moon is the inaugural artist to be commissioned by the Bass Museum for their “New Monuments” program. She is also the winner of a 2020 Knight New Work Grant for her ongoing project “The Huddle is a Prayer Circle”. Other recent exhibitions, commissions and publications included: Dust Specks on the Sea, 2021, San Francisco Art Institute; SPRTS Issue 9, 2019, Endless Editions, NYABF @MoMA PS1; How to Patch a Leaky Roof, 2019, Commissioned by O, Miami; 2 & a possible, 2019, Supplement Projects x Arts.Black
GeoVanna Gonzalez is a Miami-based artist and curator. Her practice explores shifting notions of gender and identity in our environment, and the relationships between the organic and the technological. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California where she received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design. Previous to her time in Miami, GeoVanna lived in Berlin, Germany where she became a member of Coven Berlin, a queer feminist collective which produces exhibitions and events that focus on body politics, gender, labor, and art. Her upcoming exhibitions include Hollywood Art and Culture Center, Florida; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin Germany; and NGBK, Berlin Germany.
As a curator, her most recent project was an international group show, ‘A New Prescription For Insomnia’ at Horse and Pony Fine Arts in Berlin, Germany. The exhibition was featured in Artforum, Elephant Magazine, and Berlin Art Link. In 2016, GeoVanna was the Project Manager for the Berlin Art Prize and co-curated Unearthed with Dan Halm at Rockelmann & Gallery. She is also the Co-founder of READ WHAT YOU WANT!, a reading club established in 2014.