Today from our friends at BOMB Magazine, we bring you an interview with artist Carlos Motta. Author Cat Tyc writes, “Motta’s research-based practice is constituted by discursive spaces, presented in a variety of different spatial forms, which create—in his own words—’counter-narratives that recognize suppressed histories, communities, and identities.'” This article was originally published May 6, 2016.

Carlos Motta. Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…, 2015; installation view. PinchukArtCentre, Kiev. Courtesy of Instituto de Visión, Bogotá, Mor Charpentier Galerie, Paris, and Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon.

Cat Tyc: At your artist talk at Pratt Institute, you spoke of your desire to “puncture the institution” with some of your works. You were referring to your experiences negotiating the relationship between cultural institutions and the marginal perspectives of sexual and gender politics that are often the focus of your projects—most specifically We Who Feel Differently(2012) and Gender Talents (2015). I interpret this not as a confrontation for confrontation’s sake but more as an insistence to counter a mainstream narrative that assumes that the struggles of LGBTI communities have lessened since the legalization of gay marriage. Maybe this is too specific an example to aptly consider the wide range of topics addressed in your work. Really, I’m most curious to know where your interest and insistence in constructing queer counter-narratives comes from?

Carlos Motta: There are two parts to your question that I would like to address: first, the experience of strategically presenting a socially-engaged project in an art institutional context, in order to profit from an institution’s visibility and to shed light onto a social issue that is generally neglected by other channels. Gender Talents is an archive of video portraits with trans and intersex activists in four countries: Colombia, Guatemala, India, and the United States. The motivation for the project was to construct an online platform and a discursive space to show the ways in which grass-roots gender identity activism and forms of self-determination are being established among international trans communities. In Guatemala, I worked closely with REDMMUTRANS, a young organization run by and for trans sex workers who are interested in self-empowering trans women of different class, ethnic, and racial backgrounds to defend themselves from systemic abuse. They have minimal infrastructure or financial support and have faced huge obstacles to self-organize.

Read the full article here.