C&AL: Why is it important for you to remain anonymous and who are the models of your works?
CC: For us, what is most important is conveying the message. We believe that when you know who the author is, it is automatically incorporated into the work, and we did not want the message to be attributed to us. We wanted to create a visual heroine that other women can identify with. In urban interventions we have used ski masks to accompany the work without revealing who is behind Cholita Chic. The performativity of the process of protecting the work, on the one hand, gives the work dynamism and, on the other, brings a poetic solution because in the end we became part of the work.
We recruit the women who pose for the photographs from professional schools located in the valleys where the students are of Aymara and Quechua origin. Also, through acquaintances and friends of friends. For many of them, participating in the photo session means acknowledgment and validation of indigenous beauty. By giving visibility to them and making ourselves anonymous, Cholita Chic could be any one of them. They are the next generation of cholas.
C&AL: What does the future hold for Cholita Chic?
CC: We are going to compile everything we have done with Cholita Chic since it began in 2014 and make it into a book format, including other artists’ opinions and interpretations since they feed the collective imagination that we’re trying to create. That catalogue will be published in February 2023.
On the other hand, there are many other things to see. The next themes we want to work on with Cholita Chic have to do with transvestites in recent folklore. We are going to talk about what it is to be feminine, reflecting on how the feminine is considered a risk factor for the macho system.
Cholita Chic is a collective that combines photographic production with performance art and artistic activism to denounce the exoticization of indigenous women and collectively form an inclusive imaginary with which future generations can identify.
Raquel Villar-Pérez is an academic, art curator, and writer, interested in post and decolonial discourses within contemporary art and literature from the socio-political Global South. Her research focuses on the work of women artists addressing notions of transnational feminisms, social and environmental justice, and experimental formulas of presenting these in contemporary art.
Translation: Sara Hanaburgh