Queer Life on The Margins is made possible with the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners. This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts
• Introduction
• Essays
• Artists’ Work
• Biographies
• Spanish Texts
Edge Zones (EZ) is an artist–run non-profit dedicated to the strengthening of the contemporary art environment in Miami. EZ provides opportunities and resources for under-recognized artists, making contemporary art accessible and engaging. Through the creation of encounters and cultural exchanges, EZ promotes the development of a network of artists and centers around the Caribbean, South and Central America and creates a focal point for research and awareness. We value the amazing diversity of creativity that artists provide and the importance of their activity in the social context of the city.
Activities include exhibitions, curatorial projects, festivals, international exchanges, residencies, panels, and publications. Edge Zones operates out of a new, permanent 2000 sq. ft. site in the up and coming Allapattah Art District
This project brings together LGBTQ artists from D.R. , Haiti, and Miami, who work photographs, video, music and poetry, and address the themes of the LGBTQ community and sexual diversity in their artistic production. With this we seek to contrast the similarities and differences that these artists in different areas of the Caribbean and their diasporas in Miami observe, reflect and reproduce in their work.
Queer Life in the Margins, simultaneously juxtaposes the works of artists from the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Miami in an exhibited in Edge Zones Gallery, a Zoom conversation, a book and an online video festival that aims to take the public to a moment of reflection, in which the design of a new exhibition is not tested, but rather the sociopolitical context in which the subjects operate.
Artist research, which grew over the course of the exhibition, opens up a multiple space for conscious perception and analysis of subjective realities. Therefore, all projects can be read — in their own way — as an attempt to track reality and its impact by approaching, distancing and questioning it.
For years these artists have been using the camera lens, the pen, and even their body to explore their respective surroundings, investigating the possibilities of the medium, as well as the mediated perception of the life of queer people in these Caribbean countries, the diaspora and Miami. For the first time, their practice will be shown in parallel and
in dialogue, focusing on works that have a geographical proximity to each other. However, this proximity can also turn out to be emotional in nature, or it can be presented as a conceptual and aesthetic construct. It is not what is immediately visible, but the invisible latent is the focus of the project, in which these artists explore the possibilities of active listening and collective creation. By combining different contexts, collaborations and visions, they allow to create a new space for thought, in which questions fall on the hidden, implicit and intermediate echo.
By examining historical awareness, the proven will be exposed to new uncertainty. Not as an established file, but as a progressive reorganization, the changes will become visible for the duration of the exhibition: residences, performance, forms of hybrid exposure, talks and discursive events where the visual material will be digitized, and questions will be raised publicly. An indication that the overview is not understood as a pretence of understanding and linearity, but rather as a workspace and starting point for the exploration and re-examination Queer Life in the Margins.
Queer Life in the Margins is rooted in a historic time, in which fragility becomes visible and new forces are released. This condition has a direct influence on the reality of queer subjects, but also on the production of art. With Queer Life in the Margins, Edge Zones wants to create the basis for an ongoing discussion about life on the margins and the social and artistic needs that are currently emerging or have been in demand for some time. Forming polyphonic music, art and activist interpretation, the project brings to life all kinds of works and realities.
Artists are investigating communities against the historical and current conditions of the world in crisis, and the impact of this context on our strange daily lives and the natural environment. In the process, they seek a Community experience that evades the failures of democracy and the division of countries in unequal lines.
In a contemplative body of work spanning years, these artists have inspired us to reflect on ethical issues that have dominated the past and present of these lives, and have changed our gaze to consider the time and urgency, the delicate atmosphere of queer people and the expressive live styles. The project evolved into a continuous living file of informal and recorded images of, with, and about intimacy in strange life with collaborations on the other side of the sea, because the political margin, the social margin, the economic margin, and even the emotional margin in which queer people live and develop in their different countries becomes a single common homeland, a single conceptual margin in which all LGBTQ people live regardless of their place of residence.
More than ever, we have to take care of each other,and take care of ourselves. How can this spirit of care be a productive way of working together as an artist, organizationally,
curatorially? and has become a key method to deconcentrate their own curatorial authorship, and as an essential means of working together without limits or contention. Through Queer Life, Edge Zones continues to support program as flexible, evolving, expanding and sometimes messy, of residences, performances, forms of hybrid exposure, talks and discursive events. As a growing file of online readings along the way with... projects and experience of voice, the rhythm of a body, the poetic and artistic forms of writing and how these forms of intimacy can be publicly “expressed”. For both the reader and the listener, we share the act of being read, experiencing the intimate texture of the voice, the pace of breathing, the transmission of a digitized voice to you. Queer Life in the Margins... it is a resource, a place available to contemplate, to develop the possibilities of access, an intimacy that goes beyond our networks, and walls.
Poetics against Racism: Sexual Dissent, Archives and Imaginaries.
This online event features a conversation about intersectionalities, as relating to the bodies of artists Malvin Montero, LoMaasBello and Johan Mijail. It stems from their interest in revealing heteronormative control systems as part of the colonial matrix of capitalist culture, and its implications in racism as a culture of discrimination.
The dialogue will present reflections that focus on writing, and the construction of imaginaries in contemporary art, music, dance, video, cultural cross-dressing, and poetry. These act as the engines of production for criticism of white, heteronormative, male sensibilities. In the midst of a planetary crisis, what can disobedient bodies say? From escaped bodies how is one to divert the civilizing mandate from heteronorma? How can one propose, from the black body, a thought and writing critical to ‘common sense’?
This online event invites reflections that strain the flow of consumable meanings, by proposing that the memory that activates black bodies and sexual dissidents in the cultural fabric is resistance in life.
THEY
EXPECT US TO SURVIVE! as the Cimarron shouts in the fight against heterosexual colonialism, against racism
THEY DIDN’T EXPECT US TO SURVIVE! as an activist shouts.
Maroon patch of scriptable promiscuity.
by Johan MijailOne of the emancipating effects of sexual dissent activism has been to give me the feeling of not being alone. I have found a reflection in the Other, through the visibility of their existence and work, outside the sphere of heterocisdomination.
Loneliness for me, is not just the absence of something, it means nostalgia - for the memory of a caress, a hug or a kiss. Loneliness for me is the end of the aesthetic-political project of Vegetable Love. Maybe loneliness is learning to live in pain.
I stopped feeling alone in my teens, when I read Aída Cartagena Portalatín. Through her, I learned that one is never alone, that we have
our stature, that is, a body. Portalatín writes “A woman is alone. Alone with her stature.” I reinterpret that definitive verse, taking Portalatín as a kind of Dominican queer mother, who invites us to imagine and think, in this deeply transvestophobic country, of a complex and experimental idea of the late–camp (protoqueer). She stands as a female-feminist negricia, in a generation of poetry dominated by the masculizing tradition of Dominican literature, that does not recognize, except for in a few cases (Manuel Rueda, Luis Alfredo Torres, Pedro René Contín Aybar or Hilma Contreras) that there is a curved and dystopian line marking where people of sexual and gender diversity/dissent have been, through time and place, forever, in all the spaces of life.
We must urgently break down this idea of
loneliness, to give meaning to multiple deviations from the heteronormative. We must find political encouragement in human diversity, a philosophy that places the Ubuntu credo “I am because others have been” as relevant. I don’t dance alone in this. I dance, collectively, in understanding, love, tension and controversy, with my sisters in activism.
We write to propose interruptions to the hegemonic logics that produce ‘meaning’. We write to deny the triumph of heterosexuality as a form of organization of life, and to puncture holes in the forms of representation that make supremacist realities in one body, whilst rejecting others. We write to blow up the cognitive production that manufactures racist narratives, because the bodies we have are not; not straight, not white.
Challenges to the sex-gender binary appear in my body from a subversive cross-dressing that experiences nonconformity to heteronormality hegemony from a “first I am black” critical political position. In this journey I found it more pleasant to think of microscopic spaces of cognitive emancipation.
For me, a critique of the coloniality of power must have as one of its priorities the construction of a black rationality. I stimulate the production of a black thought that becomes body, from the body and with the body. Speaking as a transvestite does not refer, only, to an appeal by the subject but also to the discourse. In other words, although there is a critique of the binary idea of identity, cross-dressing involves building a discursive reflection that starts from a proposal of my own existence, through the spaces of writing and contemporary art.
In this sense one of the strongest and most revealing learnings I have experienced through cultural cross-dressing has been being able to activate solidarity with other transvestites, to
know a language. I became a transvestite to motivate others to be themselves, not for men to write to me, to show me their penis without even saying “hello”, while masturbating, hidden from their wives, girlfriends or mothers.
I became a transvestite to decolonize my political and historical experience with language. I became a transvestite to establish a decolonial relationship with the cis and heterosexual normative production of writing and images: lives. I became a transvestite not to be the recipient of the failure of masculinity and capitalist heterosexuality, but to take a position that questions the heteronormative tradition of sex, and the clinical and colonial understandings of gender as binary and biological.
What is it to be trans? What is it to be a transvestite? What is it to be black?
Me, the one with the cotton candy hairs. Me, the one with the toasted skin flavored with Café Santo Domingo. I, who now star in screens of cinema, who appears on local television, who gets invited to Christian radio programs and stations that claim to be progressive. I, the one with the poems without metaphors, the one of the musicalized voice, the chamaquito of San Cristóbal who was obtained his passport at fifteen because the Orishas were opening roads to the other side. I, who is accused of being a meist, read megraphy in a borrowed bed but which feels mine and think of a Jeannette Miller less tired of herself. I think of a Santo Domingo that I only have close through Instagram users, I think of that Caribbean sun that looks like the fire pit that gave flames at twelve noon in the countryside that was really a neighborhood, but for those of us, that what is not a capital is woodlands and snakes. I write from myself - object of transit, eternal traveler of the genre, black - but with the memories of the lived in alleys of the Digital Republic, of that little New York, of the island that constitutes this bridge, my back.
I was born in the furrows of a people who have lost hope, in the alley of the forgotten, in the hand of those who do not even have their own selves. I was born in a devil’s locker that has the name of saint and therefore of a deceased. On streets that although dead, bleeds too much. On a roof that was scratched by black women who wanted to be free and who in their own way taught me to be. Women who were called witches and those who tried to protect me with bitter drinks which only served to connect me more to them. Women who were never too much women. When I think of the margin I don’t think queer, nor incarefully organized acronyms, I don’t think of “conditions”, mental illness, electro-chock, I think of myself. Scream in the voice of me pineapple “I’m not queer, I’m black, my orichas didn’t read J. Butler.”
In my neighborhood they don’t take you to conversation clinics because the house and school work like one. I grew up surrounded by love and hate. I grew up in evangelical churches, in assemblies, in places where I learned to feel, but where I am not welcome. I started building myself a man on corners where laughter was not necessary, on basketball and football courts, in old cars and bicycles with sound systems adapted for music to break your eardrums. I thought I was welcome in the parks, in spots, in the disco clubs, under the bridges, but also there I had to fight for the category I now run away from, man. My mother doesn’t think me a man, but she says I’m the one who calibrates the engine, instead of being in the tail, the one who sharpens the machete when they talk loud to me, the one that the metresas gave skills to work his visa if he wants, the tigueron with tits, the dembowsero. I am the materialization of the dream of my ancestrxes.
I have blurred the ages, because they say that I was born in the year of apocalyptic prophecies, seeing the light of this plane an autumn of 2000 at 12 noon makes me the problem. They accuse me of causing deaths, of fussing the world, of breaking order, of provoking God’s wrath. They say I’m the future and they forget all the other verbal times. They steal my words and spaces. I’m made of memories. The absolute present does not exist, therefore I do not believe when I am told to live the now, because my now is a memory of a thousand things lived. I don’t escape the past. My past, my now, is an extinct megafauna that still roars when I get my black rage. My now is the violence that passes through a feminized body that they turn into holes, my now is the bullet, the whip, the force that is exerted on a masculinity associated with the beast, my now is a memory of plantations. My now is a kiss to genderless bodies because before it was colonized I didn’t have it. My now is a dream in the present, past and future.
I came across words in memories. In the musicality of the voices that no psychiatrist has been able to explain and but do not cease with medications. Voices shouting oral traditions that scattered through out the world, voices that recognize me as part of this diaspora. The voices were translated into texts, poems, songs, stories and I’m just a scriber. I just leave record that I exist and existed from the before, from the now on and from the always. The reason for my writing is that and from that is where my existence comes from, but my existence is not individual. My existence is collective, for that reason the pains are intense, but so are the joys. I am no one’s voice, all have a voice; but I am the fusion of sounds and melodies that are created with the cries of millions of migrants, millions of black people, of millions of people who had to typecast in six acronyms because they built us binaries.
I’m an anti-revolution revolutionary. I’m in love. I find in the love of all dissenting bodies the taste of happiness, my revolution is tenderness. The only homeland I fight for is my body. I learned to know me from nowhere but Ju, because I had to clear the borders to keep sculpting myself. I have had to destroy categorized versions and as a tree grow down, turn into the mud, in the excreta of every animal, find mycorrhizaes, make symbiosis, learn quorum sensing and nourish the root to become strong.
I’m building a world. A world further and further from the center, a world of plants that do not give flowers and flowers that grow on the mud. A world for me and for the children I will not bring to earth, but which I will raise as I escape a masculinity that has been denied fatherhood. I’m hugging the girl and the woman I was, while I tell her I want to be a not too manly man. I’ve never felt so close to myself.
Ju PuelloAgainst the Little Subject, Mariquiqui Notes for gender/gender dissident mapping in contemporary Dominican culture
By Luis Graham Castillo1. This text should preferably be read with this background music: ¡Tu tás guillao’, pero eres mariquiquii, tu tás guillao’, pero eres mariquiqui! (You’re a guillao’, but you’re a mariquii, you’re a guillao’, but you’re a faggot!) A loud chorus that repeats again and again La Delfi in his dembow “Mariquiqui”. It plays in the background while I’m writing these a love and random notes.
2. The Delfi was the queen of the cocoró. She disappeared just under a year ago. Her death was announced without further details, whe the COVID-19 pandemic confinement in the Dominican Republic began. “In Dominican urban music, queer language and sex-gender-dissident ways flow with some organicity through the presence of figures like hers. I want to call it Effective micropolitics, “ I got to write on twitter when I found out. La Delfi appeared successfully on the local urban music scene; a scene that, reflecting the society in which it arises, is still is not devoid of misogyny and a language that discriminates. ¡Que perra!,(What a Bitch!) says the same song.
3. La Delfi’s Mariquiqui, is a mate that goes as a hetro, hocking up with women, “guillao”, but relates sex-affectively to men. A buddy in the closet. The Delfi, whose expression of gender and sexual identity defied social norms, and especially those of urban music, knows well what she is talking about: the Dominican man who, sexually oriented towards other men, hides it and leads double life. The song exposes it, as if it were a political device that forced an exit from the closet.
4. The closeted guy is of broad-spectrum. Just over ten years ago the study “Sujetos Tácitos: pertenencia y deseo homosexual entre hombres dominicanos en el exilio” (Tacits Subjects:
homosexual belonging and desire among Dominican men in exile”) (Duke University Press, 2011) was published, a book by Carlos Ulises Decena that, if we did a serious research, could be the first text to offer an analysis of the social and familial daily life of an important part of this group. Decena interviewed twenty-five gay Dominicans living in New York and found, expressed in different ways, that everyone had had to live in their home country and family environment since the “don’t ask, don’t say,” almost like that rule in the U.S. military. The tacit guy is the one we all know about, but nobody talks about. In the family it is like the “elephant in the room”; it’s there, we all know it, but we don’t have to refer to it.
5. The widespread reality in the island territory occupied by the country, which is called Dominican, is that of the little subject. It may be a strategy to survive without fitting, without losing the apparent organic belonging to the community it inhabits. That’s the way it’s always been. Heteronormativity, violently pushed by conservative power groups, Christian Churches at the helm, is a culture that throws to marginality bodies and subjects that do not fit their postulates. I’m
sorry to rain on wet conditions at this point. The non-heteronormalized body is an insulting body. The struggle for acceptance and respect is real and persistent. However, it is possible to identify moments, people and artistic-cultural productions that burst into a powerful voice to not only make visible, but also to reclaim the presence and the denied place.
6. In the Dominican cultural sector, the unwritten rule of the tacit subject is applied. Artists and intellectuals who we all know that they are or were gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transvestite or cuír, are referred only from the observation of their artistic-cultural production, while they intend to continue to hold down tacit, “we know theirs thing, but we do not talk”, and so it has been difficult for those of us who go around the world being “others” the possibility of finding references with which we can identify and recognize ourselves. We all know about Luis Alfredo Torres, Pedro René Contín Aybar, Aída Cartagena Portalatín, Hilma Contreras, Manuel Rueda, but it is not spoken or written about his sexual orientations or gender identity. Maybe one of the reasons is that they also assumed tacit, perhaps. If you ask their contemporaries, you will find one of two situations: either they decide not to refer to the subject, getting to make you feel that you are gossiping or, if they do, they count funny moments and anecdotes to laugh and make fun of them, cheeky homophobia. When has there been or will there be a break with these dynamics?
7. Rita Indiana Hernández is a tall person who has erected theirselves as a loud voice of and for the Dominican queer community. Openly sexly-dissident, Rita generates affections that transcend LGBTIQ+ community. The Dominican scene of the late 1990s saw they appear. Many of us would have liked to see figures like his on TV, radio or the press, an ID that would have
saved us so many snubs, which would have relieved us a little, at least, the heavy burden of being different in this land of Duarte. There it is, it’s the wonderful thing, new generations are growing up with that benchmark.
8. The break of that pitcher, the “keep it implied”, occurs slowly from and in the cultural scene. The fun spaces where bodies and counter-signature identities can be and perform without major concerns are no longer just clubs and bars exclusive to the LGBTIQ+ community. “Dragit”, an inclusive playful event created by the artist and filmmaker Carlos Rodríguez is an example of a party where diversity and dissent are openly celebrated. The performativity of the genre is recognized and subverted with the dance, music, clothing and queerness expressed and celebrated high. The festival is openly announced on social media and other communication spaces; unthinkable just a few years ago. Like this one, other parties and events have sprung up.
9. Since the last decades of the last century, gay clubs were the organic places for community amusement. They tell me about Penthouse, an iconic nightclub where boomers expressed
themselves bluntly. There were no apps to hook up. Penthouse, and other nightclubs, were the spaces to meet people in the scene; but they were also spaces for, away from heteronormativity, to unleash repressed desire and expressions of gender. My generation remembers Air, Arena, Cha, Fogoo and Esedekú, the only one that is still open. Today the party continues outside the shelter offered by the den; “Draguélo” is even managing to produce, inclusive Bingos games and cross-dressing story tellying events for kids as well.
10. The Delfi appeared on the scene in the past decade. With her music she presented in nightclubs, gay or straight, and still enjoys every weekend’s coterie anywhere. With La Delfi, other dembows dancers assumed a language and began telling queer stories in their songs, with less intented to mock; rather, to celebrate. Recognizing Dembow as a catalyst, urban environments are today geographies where the strategy of the tacit subject loses strength. “Deja tu estrés (“Leave Your Stress,”) by La Pajarita Paul and the Teke Teke, is another dembow that became popular in the past decade and became a kind of anthem against homophobia. “Le gusta el color rosado, ¿y qué?... Y su peluca, ¿y qué?”(“He likes the pink color, so what?... And his wig, so what?” ) it is sang at every party in the country. Dembow has ways to activate acceptance broadly with a lot of power. Not only with the lyrics and the stickyness of its rhythm, but also with its aesthetics. This sphere of meaningful production has created the environment conducive to figures such as Tokischa, openly bisexual and unapologizing about the content of her songs, and Kiko El Crazy, who has no qualms about dressing crop-tops and accessories that defy the canons of standardized male clothing, develop careers that today become signs of a break.
11. In the last decade Carlos Rodríguez produces and presents “Transit”, a documentary that seizes stories of the LGBTIQ+ community
in Santo Domingo, stories on the sidelines that generated empathy in multiple ways and audiences. Juan Carlos Arvelo has made several documentaries and reports that have been presented in the cinemas about “Los Creadores de Imagen”, a group of dissident sex-gender artists who made dance and comedy shows at the end of the last century, coming to be presented on open television and at the Patronal Festivals of almost all provinces. He also made an audiovisual on the life of “Cambumbo” (Tony Echavarría), a renowned transvestite artist who had a bar where he offered his dubbing shows and enchanted a small group of Santo Domingo society in the seventies and eighties. Juan Carlos tells me that he is researching Paco Escribano, an openly homosexual artist during the Trujillo regime, who survived with very peculiar strategies. Juanjo Cid also researches and produces audiovisual-cinematic content in that same line, such as one that has in folder on the album Penthouse, the refuge- shelter nights of the eighties and nineties.
12. It was at the home of Francis Taylor, an artist and activist who died in 2016, that a group of friends began meeting to study the texts of the queer theory in late 2015. We devour Judith Butler, Paul B. Preciado, Monique Wittig, Paco Vidarte, the aforementioned Tacit Subjects and others. In this context, the philosopher, dancer and playwright Rafael Morla was writing his work “Varones”, which was later taken to the stage directed by Isabel Spencer. Morla had already read some of these books and served as a moderator. In addition to Taylor, Morla and myself, other people who studied the theory when they were in that circle are the actor and playwright Emilio Bencosme, the journalist Margarita Cordero, the philosopher and poet Camila Rivera, the academic and activist for the DDHH Cinthya Amanecer, the economist Frank Abatte, Fiona Shékuby, among others. It was the what germinated many performances: plays, poems, articles in the press, open conservatories in cultural centers and art exhibitions.
13. If Aída Cartagena Portalatín is the Cuír Mother of the Dominican Republic, as it has been established in certain circles, then Rita Indiana Hernández is the Son and Johan Mijail Castillo is the Holy Spirit; the end of baptizing our Holy Trinity. Johan Mijail is establishing and consolidating a political impersonation in the Dominican cultural field and around the sexual and gender dissents that already creates a school. After living for a few years in Chile, where she developed a work and research that can be easily consulted on the web and expressed in texts and performances, Mijail returns to live in the country in 2018. This is significant for the local scene and the community to have. Mijail articulates a meaningful production that has the strength to ravage entire centuries of heteronormativity. Her books are devices that detonate deep reflections on dissenting bodies and identities, racism and migrant bodies. She has created “Catinga Ediciones”, an independent editor who publishes texts by Afro-descendants and people. She has just published “Chapeo”, a novel where he unsympathily narrates the peripheral daily life of “bodies that do not fit with the eurosomateca”, as its prologuist says. Mijail’s performance is as disruptive as it is scandalous, especially for the geosocial and political context to which we refer. Reflect and provoke with and on the counternorm body from the subjectivity itself; producing images and new affections that are record and memory of a rupture. Yes, the rupture is already a crack that grows.
14. These notes should be the encouragement that stimulates deep work and thorough research on Dominican queer contemporarity. That motivate serious discussions on speeches in this regard that come from the visual arts; about aesthetics and lightheartedness that opens, like a torrent, the dembow; that activates the generation of texts to understand and identify us; that leads to printing biogra-
phies of people who inspire us and fill forces to follow. May these paragraphs push the layout of the routes and the moments that have led to changes and generated new and radical empathies. They are hardly ideas-winks to continue thinking about us and for lives on the margins of this Catholic-Vinchist-Heterocentrada society to be celebrated and respected. They are notes against the tácito, referred to as ways of doing and relating that perpetuate concealment.
Los Tres Golpes, 2021, Multimedia
Los Tres Golpes: Johan Mijail, Manosiniestra, and Tim Reyes, Dominican Republic
Vague, 2021, Video
Carlos
Self-taught photographer born in 1997 in the Dominican Republic. Active since 2018, he started with Mobile photography in the Dominican Republic. His strengths are artistic and conceptual photographs with a touch of sensuality... He has worked with several local artists from my country such as Wilson Paulino, Fernando, Lesley del Cristo among others.
Josué Azor, Haiti
Photographer based in Port-au-Prince, Josué Azor has been traveling around Haiti since 2008, to merge his passion for photography and his appreciation of Haitian practices. He became interested in documentary and artistic photography and his work gradually took, among other things, a militant dimension. His first series on Vodou Roots was presented in Haïti, Italy, Benin and Burkina Faso (Fespaco). Over the past five years, Josué has been exploring the night in Port-au-Prince and the LGBTI community in Noctambules. His project has been exhibited regularly in Haiti and Internationally. He is also a member of Kolektif 2 Dimansyon, K2D, a collective of young haitian photographers based in Haiti dedicated to photojournalism and visual arts.
Steven Baboun, Haiti
Artist from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and based in New York City. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Film and Media Arts as well as a minor in Education Studies from American University and graduated from Parsons School of Design with a Master of Fine Arts in Photography. Baboun is a lens-based artist creating through photography, video, performance, and installation. His practice consists of creating in collaboration with and based off different marginalized or unrepresented communities in Haiti such as the queer community, the multicultural community (i.e. the Haitian-Syrian community), and the religious community (i.e. Haitian Vodou). His work has traveled to Los Angeles, Haiti, Miami, South Korea, China, Netherlands, and New York City. He has shown at El Rincón Social during Fotofest in Houston, Texas, an online show hosted by Dab Art on artsy.net, Photoville in New York City, Platform-L Contemporary in Seoul, South Korea, the Pingyao International Photography Festival in Shanxi, China, and Museum Belvédère in the Netherlands. Currently, Baboun is the co-founder of The Pandemic Archive, a platform sharing work from artists around the world as they make work in quarantine or during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Diego Barrera, Columbia
Film director, art director and teacher, born in Colombia, has lived much of his life in Chile - where he worked for 4 years as a professor of Cinematographic Aesthetics related to Philosophy - and Spain, where he completed his diploma in film direction and his master’s degree in art direction, focused on the world of video clips with a clear influence from video art, linking all his creation with feminisms, queer theory, as well as alchemy, the mystical technique of androginization rites, in communion with the symbol of the Alchemical Androgyne, focused on creating alliances and highlighting the important participation of women creators in music, such as his video clips for Lena Platonos {pioneer of experimental music in Greece}, Phew {pioneer of Japanese punk}, Laetitia Sadier { from the legendary band Stereolab}, Lebanon Hanover, Julee Cruise, as well as his work for Jim Jarmusch {as a musician} and the band Xiu Xiu. His work has been presented at MoMA in New York, has been on the cover of Cahiers du Cinema magazine, supported on several occasions by Pitchfork magazine, and has been exhibited at numerous festivals, galleries and museums in different parts of the world such as Spain, Italy, Argentina, USA, Peru, Colombia, Chile, France, England, Venezuela, Ecuador, Switzerland, Holland, Japan, Taiwan. As well as in various publica-
tions, magazines and television channels around the world. Together with his sister J Triangular, they created the Celestial Festival, the first festival in Latin America dedicated exclusively to queer themes and experimental art, with Genesis P-Orridge as a special guest
Sean Black, Miami
Miami-based artist, university educator and journalist working in the fields of social justice and sexual health. His decade-long tenure as Senior Editor with A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine allowed him the opportunity of photographing and interviewing numerous luminaries in the fights against HIV/AIDS including Sheryl Lee Ralph, Julie Newmar, MJ Rodriguez, Alicia Keys, Kylie Minogue, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Congressman Barney Frank, Cleve Jones, Greg Louganis and many more; thus growing the publication’s mission of collecting, archiving, publishing and distributing the art, activism, and current events emanating from the AIDS pandemic. His work has been published internationally in the LA Times, USAToday, People Magazine, NBC News, GQ Brazil, Ebony, The NewStatesman, Stern Magazine, Playbill, Springer Medizin, HIV Plus/The Advocate, Positively Aware and others. He is currently a full-time Lecturer at the University of Miami where he received his MFA in 2013. Also, continuing his work as an independent journalist and photographer his images and writings document and explore life and the human experience. In addition to his MFA, he holds an MA in Photography from California State University San Bernardino (2009) and a BS degree in Information Technology from Barry University (2004). He has lectured and exhibited internationally. Recent shows include the Society for Photographic Education’s Combined Caucus Exhibition juried by Zackary Drucker (2020), Harvey Milk Photo Center’s Art + Pride Exhibition (2020) and O.X.E.S. Artivismo em Exposicao Exhibition (2019) in collaboration with condom-artist and activist Adriana Bertini. He has been recently awarded a grant by The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) an innovative partnership of 11 United Nations (UN) Cosponsors including UNICEF, UNESCO, UN Women, WHO and The World Bank.
An emerging performer, filmmaker and visual artist based in Miami, Florida. Their work merges art practices with ritual magic, often as a means of articulating the nuances of their queer, multiracial identity. Byrnes graduated with BAs in Creative Writing and Humanities from Florida State University in 2015. They were a 2018 — 2019 Borscht Corp Film Fellow during which time they showed work in locations such as Mana Contemporary, Nite Owl Theater and the Scottish Rite Temple. In 2020, Byrnes became a founding member of ‘Witchess!’ a queer BIPOC led artist collective
Lee Campbell, England
Describes himself as ‘a born and bred South Londoner who makes experimental films and performance poetry about being gay and working class using barbaric wit and humour’. He trained in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London in 2005 and received his doctorate in 2016. He has recently performed at LGBT-centred online poetry events including INCITE!, London Queer Writers, POETRYLGBT, and DISTURBANCE, London. His recent films have been selected for many international queer film festivals including QueerBee LGBT Film Festival, The Gilbert Baker Film Festival, Kansas 2020, HOMOGRAPHY, Brussels and STATES OF DESIRE: Tom of Finland in the Queer Imagination, Casa de Duende, Philadelphia, USA. He has been selected for WICKED QUEER 2021 in Boston, USA, one of the oldest and largest LGBT film festivals in the world. Forthcoming performances include Cruising Dystopia curated by Nouvelle Organon, Berlin.
Juanjo Cid, Dominican Republic
ditor, teacher, and video-artist. Born in Santo Domingo of 1986 under the sign of Scorpio he studies film in Miami and New York then later worked as an editor and post-producer in his homeland collaborating with artists the like of Rita Indiana and Carnegato, and creating viral sensations like “Salon Belkys”. His thirst for knowledge made him bet for the EICTV in Cuba where he specialized in film editing. Since then his collaborations has been selected at different film festivals like the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Cinéma du Réel in Paris, Festival Internacional de Cine de La Habana, amongst others. He has participated twice in the biennial Concurso de Arte Eduardo León Jimenes, in 2016 with artist Raquel Paiewonsky in her video-art “Isopolis” and in 2020 with artist Johan Mijail with their video-installation “Puentes”. He is also a human rights activist for the LGBTTIQ community in Dominican Republic with his organization IURA.
Danilo de la Torre, Miami
Born in Havana Cuba . Trained in classical ballet . Worked in musical theater and cabaret from age of seventeen. Went to Paris, France in 1985 to join Le Ballet Theatre de la Seine, where he continued to work in contemporary and modern dance. Visit Miami Beach in 1986 (later to be known as South Beach) Relocated there, soon to become Adora, an icon whose outrageous bouffant wigs, extraordinary makeup and captivating stage presence made him/her the undisputed “Queen of South Beach”, a title that survives even in that somewhat changed Scene. Adora’s repertoire of lip-synced interpretations include a variety of music from Yma Sumac to Opera, Edith Piaf to La Lupe. In 2008, de la Torre formed ‘Homo-Sapiens (Art for evolution) with long-time collaborator David Rohn; their first project Silencio, involved an unspoken performance Piece about a Guard and Muslim inmate of a Gitmo style Detention Camp who fall in love. They have since produced a number of performance and video and photographic works that have been produced and exhibited in Germany, Israel and the USA.
Maksaens Denis, a multimedia artist from Haiti who divides his time between Port-au-Prince and Paris, is also a dj and vj who comes from a classical music background. Appropriately, what might first appear to be unwieldy about his work has the exactitude of classical composition. Like most popular forms in the Caribbean, Denis’s artwork maintains a political consciousness while weaving together spiritual affirmation and visual poetics in playful and seductive ways. In his video installations and performances, Denis juxtaposes a range of images—scenes from daily life and religious ceremonies, digital animations, video clips of the landscape, Vodou symbols—alongside improvised soundtracks, to communicate associatively, to create an experience. I first encountered his work in April 2002 at the Société des Arts Technologiques, Montréal/Forum d’art Contemporain AfricAméricA, where Denis had installed some nine television monitors and projectors showing scenes from Port-au-Prince, Dakar, Paris, Montreal, and Miami, all flowing together with various sound effects and beats to unfold a conversation about Atlantic triangles and routes. The exhibition space was a techno disco at night, and Denis’s installation expanded and adapted each evening. But it was Mix Live Dj-Vj, an outdoor performance several months later in downtown Port-au-Prince, on the Champs de Mars, not far from the National Palace, that was my most significant experience of his work. Here the artist’s full arsenal of digital images was projected to drum-n-bass mixes in an improvisational fanfare of sound and image.
Karli Evans is a director and photographer based in Miami, FL. Energized by urban spaces and local subculture, Karli uses a camera frame to explore identity expression, place, perception, and alternate realities. Her short films have been selected to screen at New York City Independent Film Festival, Berlin Feminist Film Festival, and Borscht Film Festival locally. Karli is a double alumna of the University of Miami with an MFA in Photography and a BS in Visual Journalism.
fa Vanch, he/they, (b.1998, Cali, Colombia) is a first-generation American who migrated to the United States when he was six years old in 2005. Raised in Miami and immersed in a distinct way of living, fa Vanch began exploring identity by using art in their early life. Art became a means of comprehending the surrounding realities of being brown, foreigner, and queer in the early 2000s North American context.
Gio (Haiti) is a visual artist specialized in photography. He is the Founder of FOTOGRAF GIO, a Portau-Prince-based photography and videography company that serves the entire island by working on projects ranging from anthropology to tourism and special events. In addition, he has a background in Art History and has attended many photography workshops at Le Centre d’Art. In fact, Gio is interested in all aspects of art. For example, he is a food enthusiast who enjoys sharing dishes on “De Ma Cuisine”, an Instagram account that he created in order to promote gastronomy. Moreover, he is passionate about spirituality, and enjoys meeting up with his friends to create memories that are reflected throughout his personal artistic work. To top it off, Gio is a Human rights activist who advocates in order for people living with HIV (PLWHIV) to have access to a better quality of care, especially in the LGBTQI community.His work has been published in the local press: Le Nouvelliste,Ticket Magazine, Escapde, and RD Magazine.
Luis Graham Castillo, Dominican Republic
Communicator, cultural manager and curator of Dominican contemporary art. His practice in cultural and curatorial management seeks to create spaces of conversation and to make visible counter hegemonic ways of addressing subjectivities. He has produced curatorial and cultural projects for various institutions, such as the Network of Cultural Centers of Spain, Eduardo León Jimenes Cultural Center, Casa Who, MECA Art Fair (PR), ARTEBA (Buenos Aires) and other spaces. His publications appear in media such as Terremoto (Mexico), La Buchaca de TeoR/éTica (Costa Rica) and Artishock. Currently, he resides and works in Santo Domingo, where he concludes a Certification in Afro-Latin American Studies (Harvard), is a teacher at the Escuela de Diseño Altos de Chavón and maintains an independent curatorial practice.
Victoria Linares is a queer filmmaker based in the Dominican Republic. She studied film production in The New School in New York City. Her shorts have screened at the New Orleans Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Shorts Mexico, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, AMOR Festival Internacional de Cine LGBT+ where she won the people’s choice awards. Victoria is currently post-producing her first non fiction feature film titled IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY.
An Afro Marica Artist, originally from Buenaventura and based in Bogotá. “I use music and rhymes from the resistance to express the experiences we experience the bodies that escape the norm.” She has been making music for approximately two years. Their influences range from the rhythms of the Colombian Pacific and hip hop to reggaeton, allowing them to experience different languages in creating their musical sound and way of writing. She participated as one of the main acts of YO MARCHO TRANS organized by the Trans Community Network of Bogotá in its 2019 version. She also collaborated as one of the writers of the book Calle Flamingo: Antología Marica. They’re currently doing artivism on issues of race and gender as a member of the Collective Afro Diverso Posa Suto.
Carol-Anne McFarlane believes in action towards social reconstruction and a world of self-examination leads to self–improvement and liberation through self-definition. During her art school experience at the Atlanta College of Art, McFarlane learned to make art that reflected her personal experiences and led her to examining our collective social conditioning. McFarlane pairs her experiences with social critique to share her vision in challenging and reconstructing current social structures.
In 2017 Jamaica Biennial. Art511 Magazine named McFarlane one of the Top Ten NYC Artists Now in January 2019. The Universities Art Association of Canada Conference in Quebec in 2019. A guest on the Hazel Dooney Podcast; The Circle with Niki Lopez, and IG Live with Sugarcane Magazine. Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator and their International Cultural Exchange Program (Belize, 2019, Guadeloupe 2020, and Panama 2021) Receiving the DVCAI 2021 Artist Catalyst Award in December 2020. Miami Art Week 2020. Chief curator, Sophie Bonet, invited McFarlane to guest curate DISOBEDIENT: Redefining Feminism in a Fractured Reality for ArtServe in 2020. Beaver, the Exhibition in a Book (published 2020), The AIM Biennial in 2020, a virtual site-specific exhibition during Miami Art Week.
Johan Mijail, Dominican Republic
Writer and performer. Catinga Editions leader. He studied journalism. In 2011 he published the illustrated poetry book “Metaficción” and participated in the film Sister of the Lewis Forever Collective in Berlin, Germany. In 2014 he published “Pordioseros del Caribe,” and in 2016, together with Jorge Díaz of the University Collective of Sexual Dissidence (CUDS) “Inflamadas de Rhetorica.” Promiscuous writings for a techno-decoloniality “, both by Editorial Desbordes. He has shown his performative work in the United States, Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Germany, and Colombia. With scriptural and visual work that invites a transfeminist and decolonial imaginary. In 2015 he was awarded The Migrant Scholarship of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Chile and the Teor/éTica Catalyst Scholarship in 2020. In 2016 he participated in the 10th Meeting of the
Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics “Ex-céntrico: Disidencias, Soberanías y Performance” (University of Chile – New York University). He has been part of the anthologies “Vivir Allá” Editorial Ventana Abierta (Chile), “Inflexión marica. Escrituras del descalabro gay en América latina”(Spain), “Afectos y disidencias sexuales jota-cola-mariconas en la Abya Yala” (Mexico) and “Sin pasar por Go. Narrativa dominicana contemporánea”, compiled by Rita Indiana (Mexico). Recently he participated in the group exhibitions “Todos los tonos de la rabia” at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León (Spain) and “Colirio” at the Cultural Center of Spain in Santo Domingo. In 2018 he published with the Chilean publishing house Los Libros de la Mujer Rota “Manifiesto Antirracista. Escrituras para una biografía inmigrante”, in 2020 the fanzine “Santo Domingo is Burning” by Catinga Ediciones, and in 2021 his first novel “CHAPEO,” by the Mexican publishing house Elefanta Editorial.
Malvin Montero, Dominican Republic
Graduate of the National School of Dance (Endanza). He graduated from the Alicia Alonso Higher Institute of Dance in Choreography and Interpretation of Classical Dance, Audiovisuals, and Dance from the Rey Juan Carlos University. He has worked in the Teatro de la Zarzuela, Teatro Real, and Teatro del Canal together with the Joven Compañía Sinfónica de Madrid. Currently he runs the contemporary creation platform “Zebra
Charo Oquet, Miami
Charo Oquet (Dominican Republic 1952), based in Miami, FL, is an interdisciplinary artist whose wide-reaching practice includes performance, installation, painting, video, printmaking, ceramic and photography. Her work has been exhibited at international venues including the Pavilion of Contemporary Art (PAC), ICA, Miami, Fl; Italy; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; FL, 1st. Asuncion Biennial, Salazar Museum, Asuncion, Paraguay; Ft. Lauderdale Museum, The Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C; The XIII Havana Biennial; The Frost Museum; MoCA N. Miami, Bass Museum, New Zealand National Gallery, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, NZ, Museo de Arte Moderno, D.R. , Casal Solleric, Spain, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen, Denmark, Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin, Germany, Kunstnerne Hus, Oslo, Norway, UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural; UNESCO, Paris, Away, Edsvik Konsthall, Sollentuna, Sweden. Her awards include The Ellies, Miami’s Visual Arts Awards 20; Knight Foundation Grant, 2019; The Perez Create; NALAC ’19; MAP Fund ‘15, the Dominican Biennial, Santo Domingo ‘11; Florida State Artists Fellowship Award ‘15 & ‘06; South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual and Media Artists Fellowship ’15 & ‘05 Miami Light Project Here & Now commission; National Performance Network Artists Residency award and the QE II Arts Council of N.Z. Artist Fellowship. Her work has been featured in notable publications. Oquet’s work is found in the permanent collections of the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas, Spain; The Bass, the Fort Lauderdale and Frost Museum of Florida; New Zealand National Museum, N.Z.; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand; and the Modern Art Museum of Dominican Republic; and The World Bank. In 2002, a book, Charo Oquet – What the Mermaid Sees was published in Spain . Oquet is the author of SuperMix, Wet 2 and Wet, Arrayanos, Arrayanos Interiors and Arrayanos Portraits as well as Charo Oquet Performance Works
Tobias Packer, Miami
Tobias Packer is a queer, trans, Floridian whose photography explores gender and sexuality as expansive tools of self expression. Inspired by the recent explosion of drag performance and queer nightlife in Miami, his images capture the magic of ephemeral moments. You can find him on Instagram at @photobiased.
Ju Puello, Dominican Republic
Afro-Dominican poet, transmasculine, and migrant. He writes about the neighborhood for the neighborhood. He is co-founder of Colectiva La Maricada and editor of the Magazine La Maricada. This initiative emphasizes making visible the literature of people from the LGBTIQ + community. His art does not have a defined metric it dispenses with norms and categories. He expresses his writings in a freestyle that, far from impressing, seeks to create links with the reality of the streets by showing his resistance and protest against the system. His work has been circulated in Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, Argentina, Spain, and the Dominican Republic.
Yeifri Ramírez, Dominican Republic
1992, Dominican Republic. Bachelor in Theater and Acting at UASD and the National School of Dramatic Art (ENAD) Fine Arts, is a young actor, performer, human rights activist and LGBTIQ community in the Dominican Republic. Miember Activist of the organization Gente Activa Y Participativa (GAY P) has carried out processes with different organizations working on the topic of education, prevention and human rights, focused on women, adolescents and young people. Was a member of the UNFPA advisory panel and am currently a Community Youth Educator at the Savanah Perdida Profamily Clinic in the Youth and Community Education Program. Also theatrical, folk dancer and contemporary, is an urban cyclist and promotes the use of bicycles as a means of transport for the improvement of the environment, health and economy. Promotes youth identity, culture and beauty through hair. Identifies as human being Black, Queer, with pronoun she/they. Zodiac sign Leo.
Dominican visual artist with experience in art, commercial, documentary photography and film. Carlos uses photography to communicate the social realities that surround him. His lenses have captured a plethora of fashion weeks, bateyes of the Dominican Republic, editorial photo shoots, private portrait sessions as well as theater, film shoots, advertising campaigns, spiritual celebrations and peaceful manifestations all centered around the person, the human being. Trans’It, award winning Documentary he wrote, produced and directed that follows the lives of three Trans* identified folks in the Dominican Republic, and how their lives navigate in an ultraconservative Dominican Republic.
David Rohn, Miami
David Rohn grew up in the suburbs of New York, the city in which he lived during most of the ’70’s and ’80’s. He studied Architecture, Art and Urbanism at NYU, the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and Pratt Institute, he moved to Paris again in 1989 making and exhibiting paintings, sculptures and installation, and later settled in Miami in 1992 where he began to exhibit paintings, videos, installations, and performance. Currently associated with Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art, Miami, his work has reached museums and collections both public and private. In 2008, he formed:”Homo-Sapiens (Art for Evolution) with collaborator Danilo de la Torre for the creation and production of a variety of Performance, Video, and Photographic projects, typically with themes related to social issues.
Wagner Rossi Campos, Brazil
Master of Arts from the School of Fine Arts of UFMG – Minas Gerais - Brazil. Multidisciplinary artist, I reflect on contemporary identities and their complex connections and nets, elaborating experiences in which the intercultural, social, geographic, political, ancestral and spiritual dialogue are ways to approach a heterotypical and ephemeral belonging. Creator of the PERPENDICULAR project, I promote encounters in consonance with other artists and professionals, working as a researcher, event organizer, performer, writer, etc. I have promoted and taken part in exhibitions and events in the brazilian states such as Minas Gerais, Ceará, Alagoas, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Santa Catarina, and internationally: Argentina, Colômbia, Chile, Equador, Uruguai, USA, Spain, Italy, Germany and Portugal.
Carlos Soriano is a multidisciplinary artist from the Dominican Republic, now based in Montreal, Canada. His work as a filmmaker and performance artist has always been related to the sociopolitical reality of his country and the Caribbean, but above all to his experience as a queer man and transvestite. He has participated in the international performance festivals Chocopop and ReMapping The Caribbean (Edges Zones), and in the local show of the first promotion of the Diploma in Performance Studies of FLACSO. With Edges Zones he presented the performance Cundango: Queer Tales From The Third Of Worlds in 2009. He then received a scholarship from the Global Foundation and settled in Cuba to study at the prestigious International School of Film and TV. His films have had successful tours at film festivals. He later settled in Canada on a scholarship from Concordia University to boost his audiovisual career, and there he recently finished studies at the Insitut national de l’image et du son thanks to a Netflix scholarship, while being a drag queen and an activist against the loneliness of queer people.
Manosiniestra is the alter ego of the transdisciplinary artist Varkito García. Manosiniestra was born as a daily blog on the web, specifically on Tumblr in 2013 and on Instagram in 2015. It was from the beginning a ritual of healing and exploration. Let’s say it’s the place non-physical where subversion coexists with innocence and creates together within the artist represented in a virtual space, decorating your house for yourself and welcoming others at the same time warning them that this is a naked space. Manosiniestra has come out of virtual spaces: in a 2015 fanzine, “Manosiniestra Volume 1”, the “Esto es tan sólo una muestra de mi poder” Installation that was part of the second edition of the Queer Club Parties in the D.R., created by El Cuarto Elástico as an alternative project “ECE CLUB,” and in 2019 in the “Manosiniestra hora en video” that was shown in the “Festival Index 2019” and in the “Miami Performance Festival 2020”.
Tim Reyes is a Latin percussionist, performer, producer, and DJ born and raised in East Los Angeles California. A lifelong drummer, he writes and produces tracks and collaborates in projects ranging from punk to cumbia to hip hop and throws down hardcore DJ sets surrounded by timbales and electronic drums, and turntables. In 2017 Tim began his work in the sound design collaborating with video and visual artists. In 2020 he performed at the Faena forum with his side project called Dreamon in Miami Beach he also was featured at the Sonar Music Festival and Boiler Room in Mexico City. Currently, Tim is working on his first solo album which will be called Posttraumatic Growth which is set to be released in early 2022
Lechedevirgen Trimegisto is the pseudonym of Mexican artist, curator and producer Felipe Osornio, known for developing an expanded artistic practice that encompasses a wide range of hybrid proposals, combining sexual dissent, popular culture, witch knowledge and science with performance art, image creation, video and writing. A reference for Latin American post-pornography and queer/cuir art, his work contains a strong political burden in which he conceives the work of the artist as a medium through which the invisible becomes visible and the immaterial materializes. It takes its stage name from the alchemical tradition and lives with three kidneys thanks to the transplant that brought it back to life after 10 years of kidney failure, which is why its latest projects are focused on organ donation, disease and medicine. Lechedevirgen is a non-binary artist, positioned from the logic of generic multiplicity that exceeds the human to the halobiont, the plant world, the machinal and the demonic legion, so it responds to the pronouns he, she and they.
Queer Life in the Margins - Vida Queer en los Margenes
Este proyecto busca reunir a artistas LGBTQ, de R.D., Haití, y Miami, que trabajan fotografía, video, música y poesía, y abordar los temas de la comunidad LGBTQ y la diversidad sexual en su producción artística. Con esto buscamos contrastar las similitudes y diferencias que estos artistas en diferentes zonas del Caribe y sus diásporas en Miami observan, reflexionan y reproducen en su obra.el que no pone una prueba del diseño de una nueva exposición, sino el contexto sociopolítico en el que operan los sujetos.
Queer Life in the Margins, simultáneamente yuxtapone las obras de artistas de la República Dominicana, Haití y Miami en una exposición en Edge Zones Gallery, una conversación de Zoom, un libro y un video festival en línea que tiene como objetivo llevar al público a un momento de reflexión, en el que no se prueba el diseño de una nueva exposición, sino más bien el contexto sociopolítico en el que operan los temas.
La investigación de los artistas, que crecerá en el transcurso de la exposición, abre un espacio múltiple para la percepción consciente y el análisis de realidades subjetivas. Por lo tanto, todos los proyectos pueden ser leídos — a su manera — como un intento de rastrear la realidad y su impacto acercándose, distanciándose y cuestionándola.
Durante años estos artistas han estado utilizando la lente de la cámara, la escritura, e incluso su cuerpo para explorar sus respectivos alrededores, investigando las posibilidades del medio, así como la percepción mediada de la misma de la vida de las personas queer en estos países caribeños, la diáspora y Miami. Por primera vez, su práctica se mostrará en paralelo y en diálogo, centrándose en obras que tienen una proximidad geográfica entre sí.
Sin embargo, esta proximidad también puede
resultar ser de naturaleza emocional, o puede presentarse como una construcción conceptual y estética. No es lo inmediatamente visible, sino el latente invisible es el foco del proyecto, en la que estos artistas exploran las posibilidades de escucha activa y creación colectiva. Al combinar diferentes contextos, colaboraciones y visiones, permiten crear un nuevo espacio para el pensamiento, en el que las preguntas caen sobre el eco oculto, implícito e intermedio.
Al examinar la conciencia histórica, lo probado estará expuesto a una nueva incertidumbre. No como un archivo establecido, sino como una reorganización progresiva, los cambios se harán visibles durante la duración de la exposición: residencias, performance, formas de exposición híbrida, charlas y eventos discursivos donde se digitalizará el material visual, y se plantearán preguntas públicamente. Una indicación de que la visión general no se entiende como una pretensión de comprensión y linealidad, sino más bien como un espacio de trabajo y punto de partida para exploraciones y reexamen Queer Life in the Margins.
Queer Life in the Margins está arraigada en un tiempo histórico, en el que las fragilidades se hacen visibles y se liberan nuevas fuerzas. Esta condición tiene una influencia directa en la realidad de los sujetos queer, pero también en la producción de arte. Con Queer Life in the Margins, Edge Zones quiere crear la base para una discusión continua sobre la vida en los márgenes y las necesidades sociales y artísticas que están surgiendo actualmente o que han sido demandadas desde hace algún tiempo. Formando una música polifónica, arte e interpretación activista, el proyecto da vida a todo tipo de obras y realidades.
Los artistas están investigando a las comunidades en contra de las condiciones históricas y actuales del mundo en crisis, y el impacto de este contexto en nuestra extraña vida cotidiana y el medio ambiente natural. En el proceso, buscan una experiencia comunitaria que evada los fracasos de la democracia y la división de los países en líneas desiguales.
En un cuerpo de trabajo contemplativo que abarca años, estos artistas nos han inspirado a reflexionar sobre cuestiones éticas que han dominado el pasado y presente de estas vidas, y ha cambiado nuestra mirada para considerar el tiempo y la fugacidad, el ambiente delicado de las personas queer y los estilos expresivos en vivo. El proyecto evolucionó hasta convertirse en un archivo vivo continuo de imágenes informales y grabadas de, con, y sobre la intimidad en la vida extraña con colaboraciones del otro lado del mar, pues el margen político, el margen social, el margen económico, y hasta el margen emocional en que viven y se desarrollan las personas queer en sus diferentes países se vuelve una solo patria común, un solo margen conceptual en que viven todas las personas LGBTQ sin importar su lugar de residencia.
Más que nunca, tenemos que cuidarnos el uno al otro, y cuidar de nosotros mismos. ¿Cómo puede este espíritu de cuidado constituir una forma productiva de trabajar juntos como artista, organizativa, curatorialmente? y se ha convertido en un método clave para desconcentrar su propia autoría curatorial, y como un medio esencial para trabajar juntos sin límites ni contención. A través de Queer Life, Edge Zones continúa apoyando programas flexibles, en evolución, en expansión y a veces desordenado, de residencias, performances, formas de exposición híbrida, charlas y eventos discursivos. Como un creciente archivo de lecturas en línea a través del camino con... proyectos y experiencia de la voz, el ritmo de un cuerpo,
las formas poéticas y artísticas de escritura y cómo estas formas de intimidad pueden ser “expresadas” públicamente. Tanto para el lector como para el oyente, compartimos el acto de ser leídos, experimentar la textura íntima de la voz, el ritmo de respiración, la transmisión de voz digitalizada a usted. Queer Life in the Margins... es un recurso, un lugar disponible para contemplar, para desarrollar las posibilidades de acceso, una intimidad que va más allá de nuestras redes, y muros.
Poéticas contra el racismo: disidencia sexual, archivo e imaginarios.
Se propone como un encuentro de conversación sobre las interseccionalidades que atraviesan los cuerpos de les artistes Malvin Montero, LoMaasBello y Johan Mijail desde su interés en develar los sistemas de control heteronormativo como matriz colonial de la cultura capitalista y sus implicaciones en el racismo como cultura de la discriminación. En este diálogo se presentarán reflexiones que centran la escritura, la construcción de imaginarios del arte contemporáneo, la música, la danza, el vídeo, el travestismo cultural y la poesía como motores de producción de un sentido crítico a la tradición masculina heteroblanca.
En medio de una crisis planetaria ¿Qué pueden decir los cuerpos desobedientes? Desde cuerpos en fuga ¿Cómo desviar el mandato civilizatorio de la heteronorma? ¿Cómo proponer desde el cuerpo negro un pensamiento y escritura crítica al sentido común?
De esta manera, este evento online propone invitar a reflexiones que tensionen el flujo de significados consumibles proponiendo la memoria que activan los cuerpos negros y disidentes sexuales en el entramado cultural como resistencias en vida.
¡NO ESPERABAN QUE SOBREVIVIÉRAMOS! como un grito cimarrón de lucha contra el colonialismo heterosexual, contra el racismo
¡NO ESPERABAN QUE SOBREVIVIÉRAMOS! como grito activista.
LomaasBello,
Johan Mijail y Malvin MonteroRetazo cimarrón de promiscuidad escritural. por Johan Mijail
Uno de los efectos emancipadores, más determinantes, que me ha dado el activismo de la disidencia sexual ha sido el tener la sensación de no estar sola. Digamos, más bien, que he encontrado en las Otras referencialidad mediante la visibilidad obtenida por sus existencias y trabajo fuera del mandado de la heterocisdominación. La soledad para mí, más que la ausencia de algo, significa la nostalgia del recuerdo de una caricia, un abrazo o un beso. La soledad para mí es el fin del proyecto estético-político del amor vegetal. Quizás la soledad es aprender a vivir con un dolor.
Dejé de sentirme sola en mi adolescencia, cuando leí a Aída Cartagena Portalatín. Con ella aprendí que una nunca está sola, que nosotras tenemos nuestra estatura, es decir, un cuerpo. Tratando de reinterpretar ese verso definitivo “una mujer está sola. Sola con su estatura”. A ella la considero una especie de “madre queer dominicana” dentro de la emergencia de invitar a imaginar y pensar, en este país, profundamente travestitranshomofóbico, una idea compleja y experimental de una “mariconería tardía” (protoqueer) desde una negricia femenina-feminista en la generación de la poesía sorprendida dominada por la tradición masculizante de la “literatura dominicana”, que no reconoce, salvo algunos casos desde el rumor, el miedo y el clóset (Manuel Rueda, Luis Alfredo Torres, Pedro René Contín Aybar o Hilma Contreras) que hay una línea curva y distópica donde las personas de la diversidad/ disidencia sexual y de género tenemos un tiempo y un lugar, desde siempre, en todos los espacios estructurantes de la vida.
Que debemos derribar, urgentemente, esa idea de soledad en relación a encontrar personas que han deseado y desean desde
las mismas pulsaciones, dándole un sentido a múltiples desviaciones a lo heteronormativo. Que debemos encontrar un aliento político de la diversidad humana en el ejercicio de una memoria que ubique ese “soy porque otros han sido” del Ubuntu de la filosofía africana como algo relevante. Yo no bailo sola en esto. Bailo, colectivamente, desde la comprensión, el amor, la tensión y la polémica con mis hermanas del activismo.
Nosotras escribimos intentando proponer interrupciones a las lógicas hegemónicas de producción de sentido. Lo hacemos ejercitando pulsaciones escriturales que nieguen el triunfo de la heterosexualidad como forma de organización de la vida, lo hacemos intentando producir microfugas a las maneras de representación que ubican en realidades supremacistas unos cuerpos y rechazan otros. Nosotras escribimos intentando dinamitar los aparatos de producción cognitiva que se alinean a narraciones racistas porque los cuerpos que tenemos no son; ni heterosexuales, ni blancos.
Desde ahí, intentamos proponer críticas activistas -situadas- que toman posición frente a los formas hegemónicas de gestionar los discursos artísticos y la producción epistemológica. Es así como hemos podido encontrar un lugar en los flujos de circulación donde podamos negar una simpatía o un “estar cómodas” dentro del capitalismo global, proponiendo conceptos, prácticas, experiencias, imágenes y formas de organización que traicionen aquello que produce, habitualmente, sentido dentro del trabajo cultural. Nosotras así nos estamos escribiendo e inscribiendo dentro del arte contemporáneo, mediante un NO profundo que nos permita ofrecer un horizonte autobiográfico en busca de la colectivización de nuestra pena morena, las maneras de habitar nuestras negricias y
presencias travestis, la excentricidad que nos constituye en nuestras sexualidades desviadas de la normatividad cisheterosexual.
El paso por la alteración al binario sexo-género aparece en mi cuerpo desde un travestismo subversivo que experimenta la inconformidad a la hegemonía heteronormal desde un “primero soy negra” como posición críticopolítica. En este recorrido me ha resultado más placentero pensar espacios microscópicos de emancipación cognitiva.
Para mí una crítica a la colonialidad del poder debe tener como una de sus prioridades la construcción de una racionalidad negra. Estimulo la producción de un pensamiento negro que se hace cuerpo, desde el cuerpo y con el cuerpo. Hablar desde lo travesti no refiere, únicamente, a una apelación por el sujeto sino también por el discurso. Es decir, que si bien hay una crítica a la idea binaria de la identidad, travestirme implica la construcción de una reflexión discursiva que parte desde una propuesta de mi propia existencia y paso por los espacios de la escritura y el arte contemporáneo.
En ese sentido uno de los aprendizajes más fuertes y reveladores que he experimentando mediante el travestismo cultural ha sido el poder activar solidaridades con otras travestis, conocer un lenguaje. Devine travesti para motivar a otras a que sean ellas mismas y no para que hombres me escriban “pon la cámara” sin ni siquiera decir “hola” para mostrarme el pene, mientras se masturban escondidos de sus esposas, novias o madres.
Devine travesti para descolonizar mi experiencia política e histórica con el lenguaje. Devine travesti para establecer una relación decolonial con la producción normativa cis y heterosex-
ual de producir escritura e imágenes: vidas. Devine travesti no para ser el ano receptor del fracaso de la masculinidad y heterosexualidad capitalística, sino para tomar posición desde un sentirpensarser que cuestione la tradición heternormativa del sexo y los discursos clínicos y coloniales de comprensión del género como cultura de la continuidad del biologisismo y el binario ¿Cuál cosa es ser trans? ¿Qué cosa es ser travesti? ¿Qué cosa es ser negra?
Objeto del tránsito: memorias y utopías de un negro transmaricón
Yo, el de los pelos de algodón de azúcar. Yo, el de la piel tostada con sabor a Café Santo Domingo. Yo, que ahora protagonizo pantallas de cine, que salgo en la televisión local, al que invitan a programas de radio y emisoras cristianas que dicen ser progresistas. Yo, el de los poemas sin metáforas, el de la voz musicalizada, el chamaquito de San Cristóbal que sacó su pasaporte a los quince porque los Orishas le ‘taban abriendo camino en otro lao’. Yo, al que acusan de yoísta, leo yografía en una cama prestada pero que se siente mía y pienso en una Jeannette Miller menos cansada de sí. Pienso en un Santo Domingo que sólo tengo cerca a través de usuarios de Instagram, pienso en ese sol caribe que se parece al fogón que daba candela a las doce del mediodía en el campo, en un campo que realmente era un barrio, pero pa’ uno, lo que no es la capital es monte y culebra. Escribo desde mí -objeto del tránsito, eterno viajante del género, negro-, pero con las memorias de lo vivido en callejones de la República Digital, de ese Nueva York Chiquito, de la isla que constituye este puente, mi espalda.
Nací en los surcos de un pueblo que ha perdido la esperanza, en el callejón de los olvidados, de la mano con quienes no se tienen ni a sí mismos. Nací en un casillero del diablo que tiene nombre de santo y por lo tanto de difunto. En unas calles que para estar muertas sangran demasiado. En un techo del que se arañaban las mujeres negras que querían ser libres y que a su manera me enseñaban a serlo. Mujeres a las que llamaron brujas y de las que intentaron protegerme con tragos amargos que solo me conectaron más a ellas. Mujeres que nunca fueron demasiado mujeres. Cuando pienso en el margen no pienso en lo queer, ni en siglas cuidadosamente organizadas, no pienso en “condiciones”, en enfermedades mentales, en
electrochock, pienso en mí. Grito en la voz de yos piña “no soy queer, soy negrx, mis orichas no leyeron a J. Butler”.
En mi barrio no te llevan a clínicas de conversión porque la casa y la escuela funcionan como una. Crecí rodeado de amor y odio.
Crecí en iglesias evangélicas, en asambleas, en lugares donde aprendí a sentir, pero donde no soy bienvenido. Empecé a construirme hombre en esquinas donde las risas no hicieron falta, en canchas de basquetbol y fútbol, en carros viejos y bicicletas con bocinas adaptadas para que la música rompa tus tímpanos. Pensé que era bienvenido en los parques, en los puntos, en las discotecas, debajo de los puentes, pero también ahí tuve que luchar por la categoría de la que ahora huyo, hombre.
Mi madre no me piensa hombre, pero dice que soy el que calibra el motor, en vez de estar en la cola, el que afila el machete cuando me hablan duro, al que las metresas le dieron habilidades pa’ mangar su visa si quiere, el tiguerón con tetas, el dembowsero. Yo soy la materialización del sueño de mis ancestrxs.
He desdibujado las edades, porque dicen que nací en el año de las profecías apocalípticas, ver la luz de este plano un otoño del año 2000 a las 12 del mediodía me convierte en el problema. Me acusan de causar muertes, de alborotar el mundo, de romper el orden, de provocar la ira de Dios. Dicen que soy el futuro y olvidan todos los otros tiempos verbales. Me roban las palabras y los espacios.
Estoy hecho de memorias. El presente absoluto no existe, por eso no creo cuando me dicen que viva el ahora, porque mi ahora es una memoria de mil cosas vividas. No escapo del pasado. Mi pasado, mi ahora, es una megafauna extinta que todavía ruge cuando saco mi rabia negra. Mi ahora es la violencia que atraviesa un cuer-
po feminizado al que convierten en agujeros, mi ahora es la bala, el látigo, la fuerza que se ejerce sobre una masculinidad asociada con lo bestia, mi ahora es una memoria de plantación. Mi ahora es un beso a cuerpos sin género porque antes de ser colonizado no lo tenía. Mi ahora es un sueño en presente pasado y futuro.
Me encontré con las palabras en recuerdos. En la musicalidad de las voces que ningún psiquiatra ha podido explicar y que no cesan con medicamentos. Voces que gritan tradiciones orales que se dispersaron por el mundo, voces que me reconocen como parte de esta diáspora. Las voces se tradujeron en textos, en poemas, en canciones, en historias y yo solo soy un escriba. Yo solo dejo registro de que existo y existí desde el antes, desde el ahora y desde el siempre. La razón de mi escritura es esa y de ahí deviene mi existencia, pero mi existencia no es individual. Mi existencia es colectiva, por eso los dolores son intensos, pero también lo son las alegrías. No soy la voz de nadie, todxs tienen voz; pero soy la fusión de sonidos y melodías que se crean con los gritos de millones de migrantes, de millones de personas negras, de millones de personas que tuvieron que encasillarse en seis siglas porque nos construyeron binarios.
Soy un revolucionario anti-revolución. Estoy enamorado. Encuentro en el amor de todos los cuerpos disidentes el sabor de la felicidad, mi revolución es ternura. Por la única patria que lucho es por mi cuerpo. Aprendí a saberme de ningún lado más que de Ju, porque he tenido que borrar las fronteras para seguir esculpiéndome. He tenido que destruir versiones categorizadas y como un árbol crecer hacia abajo, volcarme en el lodo, en las excretas de todo animal, encontrar micorrizas, hacer simbiosis,
aprender el quorum sensing y nutrir la raíz para hacerme fuerte. Estoy construyendo un mundo. Un mundo cada vez más lejos del centro, un mundo de plantas que no dan flores y de flores que crecen sobre el lodo. Un mundo para mí y para lxs niñxs que no traeré a la tierra, pero que criaré mientras me escapo de una masculinidad a la que se le ha negado la paternidad. Estoy abrazando a la niña y a la mujer que fui, mientras le cuento que quiero ser un hombre no demasiado hombre. Nunca me había sentido tan cerca de mí.
Ju PuelloContra el Sujeto Tácito, Mariquiqui Apuntes para una cartografía sexo/género disidente en cultura dominicana contemporánea Por Luis
Graham Castillo1. Este texto debe ser leído, preferiblemente, con esta música de fondo: ¡Tu tás guillao’, pero eres mariquiquii, tu tás guillao’, pero eres mariquiqui! Un estribillo que repite una y otra vez La Delfi en su dembow “Mariquiqui”. Suena mientras escribo estas notas amorfas y aleatorias.
2. La Delfi era la reina del cocoró. Desapareció hace poco menos de un año. Su muerte fue anunciada sin mayores detalles recién iniciado el confinamiento por la pandemia de la COVID-19 en la República Dominicana. “En la música urbana dominicana el lenguaje queer y las maneras sexo-género-disidentes fluyen con cierta organicidad por la presencia de figuras como la suya. Micropolítica efectiva, le quiero llamar”, llegué a escribir en twitter cuando lo supe. La Delfi apareció con éxito en la escena local de la música urbana; una escena que, como reflejo de la sociedad en la que surge, no deja de estar desprovista de misoginia y un lenguaje que discrimina. ¡Que perra!, dice la misma canción.
3. Mariquiqui, el de La Delfi, es un pana que va de hetero, enamorando mujeres, “guillao”, pero se relaciona sexo-afectivamente con hombres. Un pana en el clóset. La Delfi, cuya expresión de género e identidad sexual desafió las normas sociales, y en especial las de la música urbana, sabe bien de qué habla: del hombre dominicano que, orientado sexualmente hacia otros hombres, lo oculta y lleva doble vida. La canción lo expone, como si fuera un dispositivo político que forza una salida del clóset.
4. El pana del clóset es de un amplio espectro. Hace poco más de diez años se publicó el estudio “Sujetos Tácitos: pertenencia y deseo homosexual entre hombres dominicanos en el exilio” (Duke University Press, 2011) , libro de Carlos Ulises Decena que, si hiciéramos una pesquisa seria, podría ser el primer texto que procura ofrecer un análisis de la cotidianidad social y familiar de una parte importante de este grupo. Decena entrevistó veinticinco dominicanos gays viviendo en Nueva York y encontró, expresado de diferentes maneras, que todos habían tenido que habitar en su país de origen y su entorno familiar desde el “no preguntes, no digas”, casi como aquella regla en el ejército estadounidense. El sujeto tácito es aquel del que todxs saben, pero nadie habla. En la familia es como el “elefante en la sala”; está ahí, sabemos todo, pero no hay que referirse a él.
5. La realidad generalizada en el territorio insular que ocupa el pueblo que se denomina dominicano, es la del sujeto tácito. Puede que sea una estrategia para sobrevivir sin desencajar, sin perder la aparente pertenencia orgánica a la comunidad que habita. Así ha sido siempre. La heteronormatividad, empujada violentamente por los grupos de poder conservadores, Iglesias Cristianas al frente, es una cultura que arroja a la marginalidad los cuerpos y sujetos que no encajan en sus postulados. No digo cosa alguna que se desconozca, siento llover sobre mojado a estas alturas. El cuerpo no heteronormado es un cuerpo insulto. La lucha por aceptación y respeto es real y persistente. Con todo, es posible identificar momentos, personas y producciones artístico-culturales que irrumpen con voz potente para no solo visibilizar, también para reclamar la presencia y el lugar negado.
6. En el sector cultural dominicano se aplica la norma no escrita del sujeto tácito. Artistas e intelectuales que todxs sabemos que son o fueron gays, lesbianas, bisexuales, transexuales, travestis o cuír, son referidos solo desde la observación de su producción artística-cultural, mientras se pretenden seguir manteniendo tácitos, “sabemos lo suyo, pero no hablamos”, y así se nos ha dificultado a quienes vamos por el mundo siendo “otrxs” la posibilidad de encontrar referentes con los que podamos identificarnos y reconocernos. Todxs saben de Luis Alfredo Torres, de Pedro René Contín Aybar, de Aída Cartagena Portalatín , de Hilma Contreras, de Manuel Rueda, pero no se habla o escribe sobre sus orientaciones sexuales o su identidad de género. Puede que una de las razones sea que ellxs también se asumieron tácitos, quizás. Si preguntas a sus coetáneos, vas a encontrar una de dos situaciones: o deciden no referirse al tema, llegando a hacerte sentir que andas en una onda de chisme o, si lo hacen, cuentan momentos y anécdotas chistosas para reírse y hacer burla de ellxs, homofobia descarada. ¿Cuándo se ha producido o producirá un quiebre de éstas dinámicas?
7. Rita Indiana Hernández es una tipa alta que se ha erigido como una voz también alta de y para la comunidad cuír dominicana. Abiertamente sexodisidente, Rita genera unos afectos que trascienden a las comunidad LGBTIQ+. La escena dominicana de final de los noventas la vió aparecer. A muchxs nos habría gustado ver en la TV, la radio o la prensa a figuras como ella, una identificación que nos habría ahorrado tantos desaires, que nos habría alivianado un poco, por lo menos, la pesada carga de ser diferentes en esta tierra de Duarte. Ahí está, es lo maravilloso, nuevas generaciones van creciendo con ese referente.
8. El quiebre de ese cántaro, el de “mantente tácito”, se produce lentamente desde y en la escena cultural. Los espacios de diversión en los que lxs cuerpxs y las identidades contranorma pueden ser y estar sin mayores preocupaciones ya no son solo las discotecas y los bares exclusivos para la comunidad LGBTIQ+. “Draguéalo”, un evento lúdico inclusivo creado por el artista y cineasta Carlos Rodríguez es un ejemplo de fiesta dónde se celebra la diversidad y la disidencia abiertamente. Se reconoce la performatividad del género y se subvierte con el baile, la música, la vestimenta y la pajarería expresada y celebrada por lo alto. La fiesta es anunciada abiertamente en las redes sociales y otros espacios de comunicación; impensable hace apenas unos años. Como ésta, otras fiestas y eventos han surgido.
9. Desde las últimas décadas del siglo pasado, las discotecas de mariconxs eran los lugares orgánicos para la diversión de la comunidad. Me cuentan de Penthouse, un club nocturno icónico en el que lxs boomers se expresaban sin tapujos. No existían las aplicaciones para ligar. Penthouse, y otras discotecas, eran los espacios para conocer gente de ambiente; pero también eran eso espacios para, alejados de la heteronormatividad, dar rienda suelta al deseo y las expresiones de género reprimidas. Mi generación recuerda Aire, Arena, Cha, Fogoo y Esedekú, la única que sigue abierta. Hoy la fiesta continúa fuera del refugio que ofrece el antro; “Draguéalo” está gestionando, incluso, juegos de Bingos inclusivos y eventos de cuentacuentos travestis para niñxs.
10. La Delfi apareció en la escena en la década pasada. Con su música se perreaba en las discotecas, de ambiente gay o las straights, y aún se goza en el teteo de cada fin de semana
en cualquier lugar. Con La Delfi, otros dembowseros asumieron un lenguaje y empezaron a contar historias de pájaros en sus canciones, siendo menor la otrora intención de burla; más bien, celebra. Reconociendo el dembow como un catalizador, los ambientes urbanos son hoy día geografías dónde la estrategia del sujeto tácito pierde fuerza. “Deja tu estrés”, de La Pajarita Paul y los Teke Teke, es otro dembow que se popularizó en la pasada década y se convirtió en una especie de himno contra la homofobia. “Le gusta el color rosado, ¿y qué?... Y su peluca, ¿y qué?”, se cantaba en todas las fiestas del país. El dembow tiene maneras de activar aceptación de manera generalizada con mucho power. No solo con la letra y lo pegajoso de su ritmo, también con su estética. Esa esfera de producción de sentido ha creado el ambiente propicio para que figuras como Tokischa, abiertamente bisexual y sin tapujos respecto al contenido de sus canciones, y Kiko El Crazy, que no tiene reparos para vestir crop-tops y accesorios que desafían los cánones de la indumentaria masculina normalizada, desarrollen carreras que hoy se nos vuelven signos de un quiebre.
11. En la década recién pasada Carlos Rodríguez produce y presenta “Transit”, un documental que visibiliza historias de la comunidad LGBTIQ+ en Santo Domingo, historias al margen que generaron empatías en múltiples maneras y públicos. Juan Carlos Arvelo ha realizado varios documentales y reportajes que se han presentado en las salas de cine sobre “Los Creadores de Imagen”, un grupo de artistas sexo-género disidentes que hacían shows de baile y comedia a finales del siglo pasado, llegando a presentarse en televisión abierta y en las Fiestas Patronales de casi todas las provincias. También realizó un audiovisual sobre la vida de “Cambumbo” (Tony Echavarría), un reconocido artista-travesti que tenía un bar donde ofrecía sus shows de doblaje y encanta-
ba a un grupo reducido de la sociedad capitaleña en los setentas y ochentas. Me cuenta Juan Carlos que está investigando sobre Paco Escribano, un artistas abiertamente homosexual durante el régimen de Trujillo, que sobrevivió con estrategias muy peculiares. Juanjo Cid también investiga y produce contenido audiovisual-cinematográfico en esa misma línea, como uno que tiene en carpeta sobre la disco Penthouse, aquel hueco-refugio nocturno de los ochentas y noventas.
12. Fue en casa de Francis Taylor, artista y activista que murió el 2016, que un grupo de amigxs empezamos a reunirnos para estudiar los textos de la teoría cuír a finales del 2015. Nos devoramos a Judith Butler, Paul B. Preciado, Monique Wittig, Paco Vidarte, el citado Sujetos Tácitos y otros más. En ese marco, el filósofo, bailarín y dramaturgo Rafael Morla estaba escribiendo su obra “Varones”, que un tiempo después se llevó a escena dirigida por Isabel Spencer. Morla ya se había leído algunos de esos libros y nos servía de moderador. Además de Taylor, Morla y mi persona, otrxs que estudiaban la teoría cuír en ese círculo son el actor y dramaturgo Emilio Bencosme, la periodista Margarita Cordero, la filósofa y poeta Camila Rivera, la académica y activista por los DDHH Cinthya Amanecer, el economista Frank Abatte, Fiona Shékuby, entre otras. Fue el germen de muchas realizaciones: Obras de teatro, poemarios, artículos en la prensa, conservatorios abiertos en centros culturales y exposiciones de arte.
13. Si Aída Cartagena Portalatín es la Madre Cuír de la República Dominicana, como ya se dice en ciertos círculos, entonces Rita Indiana Hernández es La Hija y Johan Mijaíl Castillo es la Espíritu Santa; las cabo de bautizar nuestra Trinidad Pajarística. Johan Mijaíl anda estableciendo y consolidando una impronta política en el ámbito cultural dominicano y en torno
a las disidencias sexuales y de género que ya crea escuela. Luego de vivir unos años en Chile, donde desarrolló un trabajo e investigación consultable fácilmente en la web y expresado en textos y performances, Mijaíl regresa a vivir al país en el 2018. Esto es significativo para la escena local y la comunidad cuír. Mijaíl articula una producción de sentido que tiene la fuerza de arrasar siglos enteros de heteronormatividad. Sus libros, son dispositivos que detonan reflexiones profundas sobre los cuerpos y las identidades disidentes, el racismo y los cuerpos migrantes. Ha creado “Catinga Ediciones”, una editora independiente que publica textos de afrodescendientes y personas cuír. Acaba de publicar “Chapeo”, una novela donde narra desenfadadamente la cotidianidad periférica de “cuerpos que no encajan con la eurosomateca”, como lo dice su prologuista. La performance de Mijaíl es tan disrruptiva como escandalosa, sobre todo para el contexto geosocial y político al que nos referimos. Reflexiona y provoca con y sobre el cuerpo contranorma desde la propia subjetividad; produciendo imágenes y nuevos afectos que son registro y memoria de una ruptura. Sí, la ruptura ya es una rajada que crece.
14. Estos apuntes habrán de ser el aliento que estimule trabajos profundos e investigaciones concienzudas sobre la contemporaneidad cuír dominicana. Que motive discusiones serias obre los discursos en ese sentido que se alzan desde las artes visuales; sobre la estética y el desenfado que abre, como un torrente, el dembow; que active la generación de textos para entendernos e identificarnos; que lleve a imprenta biografías de gente que nos inspire y llene fuerzas para seguir. Que estos párrafos empujen el trazado de las rutas y los momen-
tos que han pautado cambios y generado empatías nuevas y radicales. Apenas son ideasguiños para seguir pensándonos y que las vidas en los márgenes de esta sociedad católica-vinchista-heterocentrada sean celebradas y respetadas. Son apuntes contra lo tácito, referido como los modos de hacer y relacionarnos que perpetúan el ocultamiento.
15. El mapa está empezando a aparecer en el papel, Mariquiqui. Que siga sonando La Delfi.
