Kaleidoscopic No. 31: Studio Lenca
Identities and cultures intertwined...
Leonardo Bravo:
Hello, this is Leonardo and I'm here interviewing Jose Campos for Kaleidoscopic Project. Jose, you name your overall practice as Studio Lenca and I came across your work just a few months after I moved to New York last year. I was really struck by your project that I saw at the gallery, Kates-Ferri Projects, called Rutas which drew me to reach out to you and I've been following your practice since then, so I'm delighted to be in conversation with you and to have a little opportunity to chat. So thank you!
Jose Campos:
No, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Yeah, we connected with the work that I did in New York at Kates-Ferri Projects and I work as Studio Lenca and I just kind of want to explain that a little bit.
Leonardo Bravo:
Yeah, I thought we would start there. Why that that handle or that moniker?
Jose Campos:
So I position my practice as a studio because people often ask me, when did I become an artist? And I find that question quite funny because I've always felt this way. I feel like I'm just kind of being myself. Yeah. <laughs> And I was making work in my garage as a child. And I was working with my mother on sort of making recuerdos for parties and I really value that itself as an art practice. And through my education I started to study dance. I was working in a formal studio, in a ballet studio, and then I sort of started making work that was more visual. So I started making choreographic works for gallery spaces or site specific works and I also started making films.
Jose Campos:
What was changing was the studio and how I defined the studio space. I was also a teacher in Southeast London for about 10 years, and I very much saw the classroom as a studio space. So I saw myself as an artist, teacher, both identities intertwined; and that's why I use the word studio now. It's not something that is tied down to a particular process or material. It is more a space for experimentation. And then Lenca are some of the indigenous people of Eastern El Salvador and Honduras and that's where I was born. And my mother's side has roots, raices, to the Lenca people.
Leonardo Bravo:
That's wonderful. The fact that you started out more in a dance based practice, and your practice is very expansive, and I think it takes in multiple points of views, multiple approaches, and multiple points of exchange and reciprocity. I like how you define that broadly in that sense.
Leonardo Bravo:
Let’s chat about the project Rutas. I really love that fact that it's a collaborative approach and you worked with migrant communities in New York City but it also touches on your own history. So histories about migrations and visibility. And it’s the project I saw at Kates-Ferri Projects gallery in New York.
Jose Campos:
So I created this collaborative project that started in Mexico City and I worked with a residency in Mexico City and a hostel as well called Casa Tochan which is a space for migrants who are about to cross into the US border, the US/Mexico border. They help with things like healthcare, and a place to sleep, and legal advice. So I spent a month getting to know that space and going there and eventually it emerged that it was really important to document these undocumented journeys through painting. So we made a collection of small, kind of A4 sized paintings of the routes that people were taking into the United States. And then I repeated that same project in New York City and I worked with an organization called Mixteca in Brooklyn. And there again, I took the time to get to know the organization and the people that run it who know those communities better. Because when you're working with these communities, you have to rely on these organizations as the bridge as there's a lot of of safeguarding issues, of course, and questions about ethics and things like that.
Leonardo Bravo:
And trust, ultimately the trust building.
Jose Campos:
Ultimately trust, yes. So, we created more paintings of journeys into the United States by the people that took them and then we exhibited those paintings. There was about 25 paintings that we made and we exhibited them at Kates-Ferri Projects on the Lower East Side in New York City. And we had a big opening for the people that created the paintings. And it's really exciting because now I can share with you as well that those paintings are going to El Museo del Barrio In New York in October,
Leonardo Bravo:
Of this year in October?
Jose Campos:
Yeah. Right. For Flow States - LA TRIENAL 2024.
Leonardo Bravo:
Oh congratulations! And that is also an affirmation for your collaborators and the community that you worked with as well. Something I felt from these small paintings, is that they were a vehicle for sharing these very personal histories and stories that were so deeply embedded, and they felt so honest. It's always powerful to get to a place where people are so open to sharing very personal traumas. I identify so much with this as my experience was initially as an undocumented immigrant to the United States with my family, with my mother. So I have known what it's like to live in constant fear and in the shadows. How were you able to create that space for sharing and that space of vulnerability ultimately?
Jose Campos:
A big part of it was sharing my own experience and just kind of saying, I really understand because me and my family went through this, but also working with the different organizations to create environments that allowed for kind of a softer way into these conversations.
Jose Campos:
Because what we didn't want was that people were just reliving their traumas. A lot of the sessions didn't feel like formal art sessions. We would have food and music and yes, slowly we would begin to open up. And what was interesting as well, was the democracy of the material as everyone had the same kind of art materials. And there's something about just being alongside people for a period of time that they kind of start to trust you. And then you can start to say, you know, I went on this journey and I paint a lot about it. This is an opportunity if you'd like to share a journey that you may have taken as well. And that kind of of led to this beautiful collaboration.
Leonardo Bravo:
I was also looking at part of a recent show of yours, a piece called Dreamland which I believe you made in collaboration with asylum seeking children. Can you share a little bit on that one as well?
Jose Campos:
Yeah. Recently I had a show here in the UK at Carl Friedman Gallery which is a gallery in a town called Margate just outside of London. The show was called Leave to Remain which is a term used by the UK home office to denote a stage that immigrants go through in order to stay in the UK. But when I was asked to do this show, I became aware that the position of the gallery itself, it's so close to the border crossings that are happening from Europe into the UK.
Jose Campos:
I had previously worked with this organization called the Kent Refugee Action Network two years ago for about six months and I wanted to work with that group again in this show. So we made sculptures of volcanoes for the space. And it was essentially a space in the gallery that you were allowed to touch the volcanoes, you were allowed to move the volcanoes in the space. So it meant that every time you went into that physical space, the landscape was different. It was sort of influx. But the volcanoes were created by around 30 unaccompanied asylum seeking children and that was through the Kent Refugee Action Network. So that took a while, about two and a half months to go to their space where we did a lot of workshops exploring language and identity. And then also inviting the children into the gallery and converting the gallery into a place of learning. The reception area became a prayer room, the first gallery became a lunchroom but really it just changed that space completely, which is what the work is about, you know? It's about changing space.
Leonardo Bravo:
It's so interesting as you're describing this and to think about the similarities across the global landscape of refugees and migration, and the global disruptions that are happening and how people are forced to migrate under desperate conditions.
Jose Campos:
That's one of the things that I discover the more I work with people with this experience is that it's a human condition. It's wanting to have a decent life for you and your family. And that is universal.
Leonardo Bravo:
Also wanted to touch on the other works which are more of your own painting practice and they are figures and portraits. They seem very regal. Can you share with us a little bit about those?
Jose Campos:
So I started painting these figures with these big hats and they're based on these dancers called Historiantes and they are dancers from El Salvador and many of the individual towns have groups of these dancers, and they retell the story of the colonization of El Salvador. They wear crowns that reference the Europeans and they carry machetes and swords and they build their costumes with local materials. So each group looks totally different. And I was drawn to that because at the time I was dancing and I thought, you know, I'm really interested in the dance that comes from where I was born but as I started to pick it up, there're almost an archive of these histories and an embodied archive.
Jose Campos:
I thought it was interesting that they were sort of the keepers and the tellers of these histories with their bodies. So yes, I kind of used them and the idea of just like storytelling and I created these colorful paintings with figures that take up most of the composition. And I always think of the experience of being undocumented in the United States which is about being invisible and hiding. So these figures are colorful, they're regal, they're celebrated, and they want you to look at them. They exert joy.
Leonardo Bravo:
Part of starting these conversations on Substack is that I'm interested in the work that artists and creative practitioners do to reconfigure or re-contextualize cultural histories. Particularly as I listen to you, you have this almost research based interest into what locality and lived experiences, cultural lived experiences feel like, look like, and how those can be expressed. Is that the way you approach it from that kind of lens? Or is that just something that just resonates particularly like, hey, I'm interested in this and I'm gonna figure out how to express it in a different way?
Jose Campos:
Hmm. I don't know. There's a few things that are happening. For me, it's like I really don't know a lot about my own personal history. For example, I don't really know my birthday since I was born during the El Salvador Civil War and a lot of the records and archives got destroyed or lost. I don't have family pictures as well. So my practice is about putting those puzzle pieces together in order for myself to try and see myself.
Jose Campos:
And actually what I'm discovering is that many Salvadorans feel that way as well. They had to move. But I think also, this is my own experience and I don't want to speak for all Salvadoreans but the more nuanced that I get the more universal the stories are and the more people from all over can connect to the work. I think that materials and the choice of materials are really important. For example, I just made a series of works with cobijas, these kind of acrylic fleece blankets and then I placed antique gold European frames on top of these blankets. So in a sense the materials act as foreigners and they create new meeting places. They shouldn't be together but they kind of intersect. Just like my identity as a person, as an undocumented person.
Leonardo Bravo:
And that's the fascinating thing about I would say these global traumas and this kind of layering that happens, but also on the other side, the resilience that comes with this kind of layering and being able to kind of flex different identities.
Jose Campos:
Yeah. I always think that the experience of having been undocumented is akin to being an artist. Because you have to make something out of nothing. You have to improvise.
Leonardo Bravo:
I find it fascinating that you're based out of Margate in Kent, England and the context of being there in a place that is so specific as compared to the rest of your life journey. How does your own sense of self become informed by traveling and living in the UK in such different context? How do issues of belonging then affect your own work and practice?
Jose Campos:
Yeah, when I first sort of moved to the UK people weren't able to put me in the same box that was happening in the US <laughs>. So it was like, I could actually just be myself. I didn't have to define myself as just a Latin immigrant. And that was liberating because for the first time I went to galleries, I went to museums because in California where I grew up I didn't feel that those spaces were for me. And that was definitely to do with the box that I was being put into.
Jose Campos:
Also being queer as well, I grew up right after the AIDS crisis in San Francisco. So I really felt the sense of like, I don't know, it felt almost like dangerous to be gay because of AIDS. And so mixed with the whole undocumented reality, that was a lot. Just kind of moving far away from that experience, physically moving to the UK allowed me to see it for what it was. I met artists here in the UK, they have this system where in secondary schools or in high school there is an art curriculum, so the general public knows about contemporary art and then they can choose to go into a university and study art there.
Jose Campos:
So I met a lot of people that were really interesting artists, and I thought, well, I identify with these people. I think I might be an artist <laughs>. I think that was the biggest gift of being able to move and discover parts of myself. This ability to up and move also comes from the experience of having to flee my country and after that I always think that everything else is easy. Like just leaving things behind and just kind of making the decision to be in a new place again - making something out of nothing. In terms of belonging, I see that people want to belong and that there is almost like a rootedness in being uprooted. So the more that I work with these marginalized communities the more I see that actually there's power in our experience and it's another place. It's like a third space or something.
Leonardo Bravo:
Well, it's like you said, that experience of being undocumented and having to flee something, I think that taps into something unique. It can be survival, but it can also be a sense of being in the world as an artist, like you said, seeing things and having to respond to the world and conditions in more immediate ways.
Jose Campos:
Yes.
Leonardo Bravo:
You've talked a little bit about your life experience and you mentioned that as a young kid you were alreday making and creating in your garage. So what were some of your inspirations along the way, either through upbringing, family, or education, and also what propelled you towards studying arts? Especially growing up in the the situations that you did, what pushed you and gave you that sense of perseverance towards pursuing the arts?
Jose Campos:
I think growing up in a very binary, strict Catholic household as a gay person..
Leonardo Bravo:
And with machismo too. Right? <Laughs>
Jose Campos:
And machismo, you know about all that, in the eighties and nineties, that was the vibe in our household. I had to find a space where I belonged so I started dancing in a ballet school locally. And I begged the director of the school, can I please come here for free? Because I could not afford it. And she did, she allowed me to be in that space, and she was a Filipino woman and I thought that took a lot of kind of vision and empathy for her to be like, yeah, that's fine, you can come here and be yourself. I became good at it, you know, I was being celebrated for being graceful.
For being feminine. And the opposite of my lived reality basically and I found a place within dance, and then eventually I started going to a high school that was the School of the Arts and there I met a choreographer called Alonzo King, and he directs the Lines Ballet company in San Francisco. Alonzo was rethinking the way we look at ballet and movement. Ballet is a discipline that is very rooted in a sort of Euro Centric ideology and position, and Alonzo is a black choreographer, male, gay, making this beautiful work that asked us to be skillful but also critical at the same time. He was developing an artistic voice alongside the dancers. I found a lot of inspiration in him and I always think about those experiences and the performances that I watched. I remember watching Pina Bausch when I was very young.
Jose Campos:
And I just thought, what is this world? It was so shocking to me coming from where I came from, but actually those moments of shock were the most sort of pedagogical ones where I learned the most. And I still hold onto them. And even when I'm in the studio, I think like, what would Pina Bausch do? Or like, how would this feel to someone? And it comes from that experience of dancing.
Leonardo Bravo:
That's beautiful. Do you continue to have performative aspects to your practice?
Jose Campos:
Yes. I recently made a piece called Esta Fregado and it's a tablecloth that's decorated with a full array of tropical fruits. And I scrubbed it so much with cleaning chemicals that it became an exercise in mark making and a sort of erasure of the tropical image. And that's a work to do with my mother who's a home cleaner but also the invisible labor that migrants do in the US and everywhere. Right? So that was kind of the result of a performative act, so a kind of durational piece. But I always think of the body, I always start with the body when I'm painting. How do I react to this color or sense of space and I think of the formal elements in terms of dance. So when you're a dancer you're literally in an empty space and you're thinking of composition, you're thinking of line, you're thinking of color, of texture. So I hold onto that and I start with the body.
Leonardo Bravo:
That's really fascinating to think about in terms of the white cube of the gallery and the formality of a white cube in the art world, and how do you fill that? How do you fill that with a body or bodies or experiences? And to expand upon that as almost like the notion of mark making or making that singular mark.
Jose Campos:
And collaborating with people as well. When you're dancing, you don't just dance alone. You dance with a group of people, and I feel the same when I'm working with displaced people in New York. It's like we are here together.
Leonardo Bravo:
There's some beautiful tensions or maybe opposites in the work. There's absence and presence within this notion of the immigrant experience. There's displacement and erasure, but also joy and what can grow from that. I feel your work is so much about pointing out these beautiful tensions or balances and how do you identify them in the context of your practice? Is that something you're conscious about or is it maybe more of third space that the work embodies?
Jose Campos:
Yes. I mean, I'm Salvadorean but I grew up Salvadorean outside of El Salvador <laughs>. So it's kind of naturally there. But the images that I choose, the materials, the symbols, I think connect with people everywhere as well. It's a universal story and in a way I'm researching the language of displacement through material. Recently I was talking to someone from El Salvador and they described my work as bittersweet, and I thought that's exactly it. It is bittersweet. That's our experience that we've had to leave a place but also we long for a place as well.
Leonardo Bravo:
What's inspiring you right now? And perhaps again, speaking of balances or tensions, what's giving you pause and there's plenty of pause in this world. The social and political moments that are happening. But let's start with the joy first!
Jose Campos:
Okay. Let's start with the joy. I have to say I'm the biggest Selena Quintanilla fan <laughs>. And the more I think about her the more I'm inspired not just because of her music but the kind of borders that she transgressed, the people that she engaged and what she represented to people. For me it was the first time that I saw that level of representation on that scale and I think through her creative practice she was able to do so much. So yeah, I always play Selena in the studio
Leonardo Bravo:
Aha, <laughs>
Jose Campos:
All the time. And that's placemaking as well. It's bringing me back to a time and place and thinking, how does my work fit in alongside what's happening here. And then what makes me pause, like you said, there's so much and we can't ignore Gaza and the things that are happening in this world. But most recently the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, fired around 300 employees from the culture ministry because they weren't aligned with the government's vision of what culture is. And one of the things that happened, one of the outcomes from this decision, was that they basically stopped a drag performance from taking place in the national theater.
Jose Campos:
So that was quite shocking to me, that moment because it was evidence that people are not allowed to be or express themselves. And also that culture is being sort of capped. And as a Salvadorearn artist outside of the country, I have a duty to share and sort of talk about this as a form of resistance in any way that I can. But that's really sort of on my mind because I have so many friends there. I have so many artist friends there that are affected by this. It's unfair really.
Leonardo Bravo:
One good thing, and I shared that I was in London last week, that the Labour party won the elections, and just with the few people that I met and talked about it, that there was such a sense of relief and hope that government can do something meaningful for everyone again.
Jose Campos:
Absolutely. It's amazing and it feels like there is a turn towards something positive, and it's great because there are a lot of turns towards the other direction in other parts of the world.
Leonardo Bravo:
Right? Well in so many places across Europe and in the United States, it's palpable turns towards a hard right approach to repressive and divisive governments.
Jose Campos:
Yes, exactly. So I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful.
Leonardo Bravo:
Besides your work being included in the next LA TRIENAL at El Museo del Barrio in New York in October with Rutas, what else have you got coming up?
Jose Campos:
I will be showing in Hong Kong at Tang Contemporary in November and I will also be at Untitled in Miami with Carl Friedman Gallery
Leonardo Bravo:
Jose, this has been wonderful and it just reaffirms so much of what I felt with your work and the time we had coffee together at MoMA, and I hope to we continue this conversation and can get together for a little bit longer time next time you're in New York.
Jose Campos:
Yes. I would love that. And yeah, I love continuing the conversation and getting to know you. I find the work that you do incredible. So thank you.
Leonardo Bravo:
Much appreciated as well.
*all images courtesy of the artist
For more information:
IG: @studiolenca
Hi there, there is a typo in the gallery name, the correct version is 'Carl Freedman'. Thanks!