Coco Guzmán

My proposal for my artistic residency at Matadero is to investigate site-specific or situated artistic practice and its queerizing transformative potential through material and formal experimentation based on the notion of queer contagion. As a non-binary queer artist ready and willing to queerize the world, this potential queer contagion, an imminent threat (Reed, 1996) to the heteronormative system that can be infected at any time and in any place, is something that interests me greatly: How can I create a work that queerizes space and the bodies that pass through it? How can art infect space, infect people, infect time? How can this artistic practice make me queer too? My intention is to explore, reconfigure, re-experiment with strategies and techniques that allow me to delve into the experience of the queer as something viral and into its capacity to “infect” bodies and discourses with dissidence. Mainly using drawing, I am keen to experiment with techniques of superimposition, abstraction, staining, texturisation, erasure, infiltration, camouflage, which belong to this queer de-aesthetics and which explore the rhizomatic, in-corporate and utopian (in the sense used by José Esteban Muñoz) generation of a dissident memory/potentiality. It is situated drawing, expanded towards installation, sculpture and performance art, inter-disciplinary and de-gendered drawing, which questions both genders and also artistic genres (Rían Lozano, 2013).

Coco Guzmán’s work investigates the space and corporeality of memory and the queer experience through situated and expanded drawing. Having graduated in Comparative Literature from the Paris 8 University, Coco continued studying at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse, and obtained a master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Art from OCAD University (Toronto). Coco has received numerous grants from the Canadian Arts Councils as well as the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Award. Coco’s work has been exhibited in Montreal (2012, 2017), Toronto (2017, 2019), Eindhoven (2017), Madrid (2017), New York (2018), Chicago (2018), Houston (2019), Mexico City (2019), Havana (2019), Murcia (2020) and Elche (2021). In 2021-2022, Coco’s drawings will travel to 18 Spanish Cultural Centres in Latin America. Since 2019, Coco has been living in Madrid and taking a PhD at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.