Transcript

Trigger: ektor garcia

Hi, my name is ektor garcia.

I grew up in a very small town and traveled a lot between the US and Mexico so I constantly was on the road and was exposed to many different communities throughout Mexico and these have always stuck out in my memory. And I had a very strict father who was very macho and I was never allowed to do anything remotely feminine so I feel like as an adult and as an artist, I’ve quite enjoyed doing gendered crafts such as crochet, and sewing, and quilting. They are very therapeutic and relaxing and I quite enjoy queering these gendered practices and combining everything and confusing things and making things more muddy and hard to understand than simple, easy to process.

The title of the installation is cuilloni and I came across this word. I do a lot of research on my own in Mexico, archeological, pre-Hispanic research. And I’m very interested in old artifacts and the way that natives lived. I came across the word cuilloni which is kind of a derogatory phrase used for gay men. I’d never heard it before and it looks really beautiful on paper so I thought about it a lot and I just thought it would be fitting with my work. I feel like the work is very queer, very gay, and also outside of that it tries to fight labels and I try not to be so boxed in and easy to pin down. So it’s pretty queer, the word for me, cuilloni. The word gay and queer have been taken back and used by communities, no longer seen as an insult but as an affirmative stance, I think of the word similarly.