Statement: Amores Postmodernos
"Amores Postmodernos" is a photographic series that renders visible the pursuit of pleasure and queer heterotopias within Guatemala City's LGBTQ+ community. The work features queer subjects engaged in contemporary narratives around social media, sex, gender, and sexuality - all layered with potent religious symbolism. By making this community's experiences and explorations openly visible, the work aims to provoke political disturbance.
The subjects are friends, strangers, and connections made through daily life, apps, and social circles in the city. All are disrupting gender norms by crafting queer identities through practices like putting on makeup, wearing feminine attire, pursuing same-gender intimacy publicly, or doing drag. Though these acts reclaim space, they also expose practitioners to societal hatred, repression, and violence for living authentically.
The photographs capture the performative essence of subjects' gender/sexual expressions in narratives juxtaposed with Catholic symbols and imagery. This religious iconography directly confronts the Church's discriminatory binary views on gender and sexuality that have persecuted the queer community. By appropriating the very doctrine used to reject their existence, the work creates a counter-narrative celebrating queer love, intimacy, and self-expression as defiant acts of liberation.
Overall, "Amores Postmodernos" provides a transcendent vision of Guatemala City's queer heterotopias - spaces where individuals can freely perform their gender and sexuality outside society's punishing norms. It's a powerful exploration of queer worldmaking through aesthetics, sensuality, and radically visible acts of celebrating one's authentic self.