A photo-performance gallery & “living archive” in progress
IMPORTANT CONTEXTUAL NOTE: First arranged and updated by Emma Tramposch and yours truly (2008-17), this first ‘living archive’ documents 'a lifetime of trouble-making and permanent artistic reinvention,’ or as a blogger noted, 'an archetypal immigrant story.’ The introduction below was written when this photo blog project was first published in 2008. Since then most images (that is those which survived the censorship wars of the Trump era and the “community standard of Tumblr) have circulated online. The blog ends in 2017, when we began to design our current website. To understand the cultural and political context of every image and project, we invite you to explore the “Essential Projects” page that appears in our current website (www.guillermogomezpeña.com).
--GP in lockdown, 2020
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For over 35 years, I’ve been obsessed with high quality photographic documentation of my performance work always in dialogue with art and political history. As a self defined Chicano, I need to be in control of my image. If not, WHITE theorists and curators will.
Throughout the years, I have been lucky to be able to work with amazing photographers such as Mexican Antonio Turok, Italian Manuel Vason, Canarian Teresa Correa, Spanish Javier Caballero, Lebanese-American RJ Muna, and Argentine Julio Pantoja, among others. In collaboration with my performance and photographer colleagues, we have developed dozens of “photo-performance” archives and portfolios. Many of these photos populate my 20 books and myriad magazines, newspapers, websites, posters, brochures and even a few murals and comic books. Others are virtually unknown, especially those capturing projects which were invisible to the art world, a euphemism for strategic exclusion or “bad taste”. Paradoxically these are my favorite images.
What follows is a draft of the book I would love to publish before I die, including my favorite photographs ever taken; those iconic historical images I treasure due to their sentimental power, symbolic weight and historical significance. More than 30% of these images have never been seen before.
This living archive is loosely arranged in the following order:
1.-My family’s vernacular performativity and my early years: ~Pages 1-2.
2.-My first involuntary and (semi) voluntary performances: ~Pages 2-3.
3.-Art school & early years in Los Angeles: ~Pages 3-4.
4.-The origins of border art (Tijuana-San Diego): ~Pages 5-6.
5.-Reverse Anthropology: Challenging museum representations of the Other: ~Pages 6-9.
6.-Mexi-cyborgs, Mexterminator & beyond: La Pocha Nostra’s early projects: ~Pages 9-13.
7.-The performance workshop as the ultimate project: ~Pages 13-18.
8.-The new Pocha Nostra’s “ultra-baroque” aesthetics (2008-Ongoing): ~Pages 18-22.
9.-Selected photo-performance portfolios: ~Pages 22-29.
10.-The New Pocha Nostra Troupe: ~29-31
11.-Current Public Interventions: ~31
Bear in mind this is an interrupted work-in-progress, frozen in time: As of today, we are still fine-tuning exact dates and completing credits. In the future, as we find more assistants to help us, we will add more unique photos and include the complete names of the photographers and collaborating artists appearing in every photo.
As you explore this visual diary, if you have information for a missing credit or you have a copy of a unique unpublished photo, please mail it to us at: [email protected]
Gómez-Peña, June 2017
Year of the Wounded Coyote
(Note: GP stands for Gómez-Peña)Fww