A playfully provocative delve into work of performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his dance/art troupe La Pocha Nostra, Amber Bemak’s engagingly breezy and busy documentary manages to offer plenty of insight into culture and politics while also playfully blurring the line between filmmaker and subject. The film receives its international premiere in Lisbon.
Gómez-Peña declares he is a performance artist interested in cultural topography – “my body is a camera of echoes…my body is my political continent” he says – as he declares how borders are fluid in nature, with special reference to the Mexico/US border, which itself has become a place for art to exist and provoke, especially in more recent years.
“Thirty years ago, the border was a geopolitical dividing line,” says Gómez-Peña. “But for me the border is a spiral where multiple cultures converge and collide. A womb of possibilities, a very useful theoretical metaphor to describe the condition of millions of orphans of nation-states all around the world.”
He adds: ”We understand how important it is for queer de-territorialised border-crossing Chicanos and Latin Americans to have access to the major temples of the US and European art world. We may be exhibited at the Venice Biennale for like a week…and then we are going to return to oblivion, which is the place we inhabit – the dark barrios of the periphery in the contemporary art world, and that will never change.”
“I have been on this treadmill for 40 years. I have won every international award possible and still I cannot pay my monthly bills,” he warns.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a passionate and provocative figure, eloquent and brimming with ideas and humour, and this is reflected in Bemak’s filmmaking style which sees the film packed with archive material, animated sequences and footage of performance art. It is also important for the process for director Bemak to be part of the project on-screen as well as behind the camera, and she often appears unclothed, declaring herself as the “naked director”.
The film’s chapter headings turn out to be arbitrary, but they do add to the playful tone. Even the supposedly spontaneous banter between filmmaker and artist – she notes his pretentions while he labels her an “East Coast, Jewish intellectual” – feel engagingly well-rehearsed. There is a niggling sense that there could be more depth at times and some of the performance footage could have been more fleshed out, but Bemak gets through a lot of history, attitude and content in a shortish running time.
At the core is the determination of Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra to raise key issues in culture and politics. As one of the group states: “During these times in which we’re governed by fascism, discrimination and the far right, it’s important to raise our voices against state terrorism and genocide.”
“As performance artists it’s our responsibility. Especially in Latin America, it’s important to speak against the system and the Government. To go beyond the aesthetics of the work and to really take action. I believe Guillermo’s work is very important. His work has influenced generations like mine. It motivated me to take action in an ironic and direct way.”
While Gómez-Peña offers verbal dexterity and reflection on his years at the performance art coal-face, the sequences featuring members of La Pocha Nostra show off the breadth of artistic variation – from Michèle Ceballos Michot’s “aging ballerina” through to members using bodies as “art-facts”, with the film spiralling towards a retrospective of their work featuring new moments of art.
Most amusing is when Gómez-Peña recounts the number of times he has crossed the Mexico/US border and how the nicer he dressed the more likely it seemed that he would be “randomly selected” for a secondary inspection. But once he started dressing as a mariachi performer the Border Patrol agents became less threatening, and viewed him as a harmless entertainer, rather than a firebrand performance artist.
Mexico-US, 2022,
84mins
Dir: Amber Bemak
Producers: Amber Bemak, Andrew Houchens
Scr: Amber Bemak, Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Cinematography: Alicia Aguirre, Amber Bemak, Mariana Ochoa
Editor: Miguel Schuerdfinger
Music: Guillermo Gallindo
With: Guillermo Gómez-Peña, La Pocha Nostra
