CARLOS MOTTA
Carlos Motta has disguised himself in many ways, including as a naked Christ figure tied upside down on the cross and as a feral faun in nature. He has also created a vast online presence of people who, like him, “feel differently” and insist on radical resistance to heteronormative institutions. Originally from Bogotá, Colombia, and now based in New York, the 43-year-old artist thinks of himself as a queer Latin American migrant and roots his multi-disciplined practice in the forced movement of people over borders. In “a time of pervasive conformity and strategic pragmatism”, Motta’s international projects – as well as his intimate ones – celebrate creative disobedience and dissident identities.
Interview by Claudia SteinbergPortrait by Cory Rice
Claudia Steinberg You employ many different strategies in your art. You work like a journalist, a sociologist and a researcher, but you also use photography, performance art, drawings and sculpture to express your ideas. Can you talk about these different approaches and where they might intersect?
Carlos Motta There have been two distinct lines to my work, with one having had to do with researching and understanding democracy as a system of governance and the effects its implementation has on our psyches. Oftentimes, the projects that I have done to engage between the content of the work and its forms is always intrinsically connected. I could not think of them separately.
CS You mentioned democracy as the main framework for thinking about social issues, about equality, as well as aesthetic issues. Are you taking the United States as your point of departure, and if so, do you think of it as the best system even in theory, or are there other political structures that might better guarantee equality?
CM Since the beginning of my career, I have been interested in understanding – specifically within the Latin American context – the idea of democracy as a system of governance and the ways in which it has been used on many occasions as an excuse for interventionist behaviour on the part of the United States.
CS Your 2005 work Brief History included an artwork that could be taken away of a newsprint sheet that listed US involvement in Latin America since 1946, from the military support for Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier to the overthrow of the Brazilian government in 1964 to the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s. Considering its support for oppressive regimes, how democratic can the US be?
CM The United States is definitely a democratic country. Even with all its problems and its pitfalls, democratic representation and the sovereign election of governance are still in place. I’ve been interested in the idea of democracy as an idealised system, but also as the most efficient form of government so far, in spite of its many problems in relation to capitalism. I find it very important to understand the political and social mechanisms that have to be put in place in order to create democracy as a political system. My projects have been a way for me to engage critically with these issues of politics and society.
CS In your work, Deus Pobre, you publicly staged and recorded sermons that originated in liberation theology. How did people deal with this now-historical material? Did they feel you were addressing an acute situation?
CM For Deus Pobre, I was researching histories of liberation theology, especially from Latin America, but also from Portugal as I was working with the Serralves Museum in Porto at the time and had an exhibition there. I approached this work by drawing on some of the key texts by liberation theologists in Latin America, including Leonardo Boff from Brazil and Camilo Torres Restrepo from Colombia, who were active from the 1940s onward. As part of my practice of re-enacting historical documents, I wanted to revisit these texts from the perspective of the failure of liberation theology, which hoped to construct a more equitable and democratic-socialist society. It was very rare that priests would take a political stance, so liberation theology was a revolutionary gesture. Many of these texts were still in line with religious discourse, but others, like those by Camilo Torres, were not. He left the Church because he considered it too compromised and became a dissident priest preaching from outside the Church as a revolutionary. I wanted to understand how these ideas of liberation theology would literally sound and resonate within the Church. So I worked with six priests in the Porto region of Portugal, who adhered to these beliefs and who were still practising priests with their own churches. I invited them to perform excerpts from this text, Deus Pobre, by a Latin American liberation theologist in their Sunday mass, so that the people attending the sermon would be confronted with some of these radical ideas from a different time and I could see how they responded and what happened. We did that live; there were six performances by the priests, which were documented, and a lot of that material was presented as part of the exhibition.
CS Why did leftist liberation theology fail?
CM It depends on your measure of success. It failed in the sense that socialism failed to transform society and change the political system and the system of representation. But it did provide useful tools to think about social change, even up to the present. As for my project, I realised how complicated it was to try to work through some of these really revolutionary ideas within an institution as strong as the Church.
CS You also worked with the liberation theologist Marcella Althaus-Reid who wrote about the sexuality of Christ, a beautiful man we are used to seeing almost naked on the cross. There is a lot of erotic potential in this figure, and a character like Mary Magdalene plays into to that.
CM As a feminist and queer liberation theologist, Marcella Althaus-Reid was interested in queering the historical religious narratives around Jesus, thinking about sexualising them, about normalising the relationship to his body instead of mystifying it. She believed that this would lead to social change in Christian societies. Marcella was literally talking about lifting the skirt of the Virgin, showing the genitals of Christ, removing the veil of secrecy.
CS Delving deep into archives is an important aspect of your work. For one recent project, you were searching for references to homosexuality in European and Latin American archives. What made finding references more difficult was that the subject you were looking for was obscured by legalistic terminology. For example, European archives obscured homosexual acts behind the Latin word nefandus, meaning “unspeakable”
CM I conducted archival research in different national archives in Portugal, Spain and Latin America, but mostly in Colombia. My idea was to search through the criminal cases that live in those archives to find references to sodomites as criminals. I wanted to see the ways in which the moral and legal categories were closely intertwined at the time, and what that meant for people who had an experience with the legal system, who had been tried for being considered deviant or suffering medical aberrations. I found that they were archived within the criminal cases without being labelled as sexual transgression or any other modern category of this kind. What they show are the ways in which heterosexuality defines the ways in which society thinks about what is normal and expected: the use of the sexual organs for reproduction. Anything else is considered a deviation from the norm. Based on this research, I’ve created a series of fictional films that tell the stories of the characters represented in these criminal cases from their point of view – like a “hermaphrodite” named Martina Parra who had a sexual relationship with another woman and was prosecuted by the colonial court in Colombia in 1803 for having an unnatural body. I used speculative fiction, which allowed me to present the findings of these documents while also changing the course of history by creating emancipatory narratives around some of the characters’ lives, giving them happy endings. From the archives, their lives can only be understood within a violent framework – their encounter with colonial law. That’s the only reason we know about these sodomites, which is a very reductive way of making somebody part of history.
CS It is complicated and fascinating how criminal records can end up being the only trace of history. The recent exhibit Artists and Agents in Germany was based on the meticulous records about Eastern Bloc performance artists during the Cold War; they were considered decadent, subversive, and dangerous agents of the West, and their activities were meticulously documented in government files. These are now the only evidence of their ephemeral art practice. The existence of these descriptions and photos came at an incredible cost for the artists, however.
CM Criminal cases reduce people’s lives to an exception, but they give us a chance to learn about them. The problem is that this way you only think of expressions of sexualities or different forms of gender through the lens of what has been documented as history, whereas we know that many forms of sexuality and gender were also possible in the past and escaped any interaction with the law. But the discipline of history is so conditioned by the drive – and requirement – to document scientifically.
CS What has escaped documentation simply doesn’t exist.
CM Exactly. At the heart of these projects has been my intention to show how history renders things non-existent and my attempt to take a different approach to history that includes speculation and fiction, imagining other lives that are not rigidly documented beyond the ways in which the historical methodology expects you to proceed. I also studied some anthropological and other texts from the social sciences around some of these cases, but I was less interested in somebody else’s interpretation through social scientific methods and preferred creating my own relationship to these people, considering how some of the social sciences are also complicit in these processes of discrimination and sidelining.
CS For your project Towards a Homoerotic Historiography, you combed through the furthest reaches of Latin American art and ethnographic museums in search of pre-Columbian depictions of homosexual acts, which have mostly been hidden from the public since the beginning of colonial times.
CM I built my own mini-archive of these representations and eventually created miniature replicas in precious metals. The idea was to mimic the ways in which an encyclopedic museum would rely on means of presentation, from the carpeting to the small backlit boxes for the figures. So for my show at the Metropolitan Museum, I created a room that would present itself in a very institutional manner and provide a seductive experience for the viewer, who would then be confronted by these forms of sexuality. The objects are about the size of your thumb, and they are categorised loosely based on the place where the originals were found. The message was not that homoerotic encounters took place in these cultures, but rather that the categories of sexuality and gender are in themselves part of colonialism, including the language that we use to describe them. ◉