C&AL: How has the coronavirus pandemic and its consequences affected your work?
MM: It has always been very difficult to sustain our work with the few spaces we have. Art was already rudimentary and precarious but now, after COVID-19, the possibilities have become null and void. If art needs such a high level of comfort to exist, we will never be able to understand it from our reality. Creating art from a precarious position is a challenge and an opportunity. And making art from hunger is a reality, it’s so original, so alive. In this reality, from the shores of ‘Sudaca” [colloquial (derogatory) term used to refer to people of South American origin], art is redefined and acquires new possibilities.
C&AL: What are your plans for the future?
MM: My artistic constitution needs to take a turn to create for the We. Being a queer, poor, brown South American, I am an extremely exotic object for otherness. While it’s interesting to discuss that reality, this is not the time for me to be preaching the word from the margins to the center. We need to go back to creating art on the shores and peripheries and strengthen our artistic positions from there. My goal after all this is to create art by us and for us, and from a position that speaks from the sameness. An artistic construction that speaks to us, to ourselves in order to reinforce ourselves. Return to the origins and reinforce the trunk so that the branches can reach out.
Maximiliano Mamani is an Andean artist from Jujuy, Argentina. He is a dancer and professor of folklore and studied anthropology at the University of Salta. As a drag queen artist, he has created Bartolina Xixa, a character inspired by the chola paceña and the revolutionary leader Bartolina Sisa. He lives in Tilcara, Jujuy.
Marie-Louise Stille, who conducted the interview, is a cultural project manager and contributor at C&AL. She lives in Berlin.
Translation from Spanish by Zarifa Mohamad Petersen