Jade (Puppies Puppies) and I (PHILTH HAUS) had a chance to exchange a few texts after meeting up during her most recent performance and installation at Hannah Hoffman Gallery in Los Angeles. We hadn’t seen each other for over three years, so we had a lot to excavate—from the omnipresent media specter of our trans community to an ongoing affair with the color green.
Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies), ‘A sculpture for Trans Women A sculpture for the Non-Binary Femmes A sculpture for Two-Spirit People • I am a woman. I don’t care what you think • (Transphobia is everywhere and everyone is susceptible to enacting it at any moment) (Unlearn the transphobia brewing within) I am a Trans Women. I am a Two-Spirit Person. I am a Woman. This is for my sisters and siblings everywhere. History erased many of us but we are still here. I will fight for our rights until the day I die. Exile me and I’ll keep fighting.’, 2022. Details. Bronze cast on engraved brass base, 75 x 24 x 24 in. Courtesy of the artist, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Galerie Balice Hertling, Galerie Barbara Weiss, and Galerie Francesca Pia. Photos: Vincent Blebois.
PHILTH HAUS: Hey Bb.
JADE GUANARO KURIKI-OLIVO (PUPPIES PUPPIES): Hey Sis!
PH: Let’s get into it :). I am thinking specifically about the performance of yours I witnessed recently at Hannah Hoffman, a reinterpretation of Ana Mendieta’s 1970s nude performance. This performance lasted three hours, your body leaning on a table and facing away from us with one sparse spotlight casting over you from the floor. I was transfixed for an hour, especially interested in how you would navigate terminating such a long endurance work. There was something very honest about the way you did—a gallery attendant informed you that the desired duration had been reached, and you tilted back up and walked into the next room with no fanfare.
Speaking about a potential form of honesty (or vulnerability), I have noticed that much of your performance work has shifted to feature your body naked in public or semi-public spaces. Does the nudity of your body translate into visibility within your work? When does or doesn’t visibility feel like equity in this world?
JO: I’ve had beautiful conversations that make me realize the importance of visibility. Conversations that have stopped me from leaning into the nihilistic side of myself, the voice in the cacophony of voices in my mind asking, “What’s the point?” This voice is then counteracted by trans, nonbinary, two-spirit + people and artists who reach out to me and tell me how much a certain sculpture, piece, or show meant to them and that it made them realize something within themselves. It made them realize it’s possible to be a trans woman, a trans person who makes art that feels meaningful but also sustainable.
Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies), 2022. Performance, June 18, 2022, Scala Basel, Switzerland. Courtesy of the artist and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.
I can’t help but go back in my memory to seeing Una mujer fantástica (A Fantastic Woman) (2017) on the big screen in Hollywood. I was 27 and still a baby trans. This means I had gone 27 years without seeing a single lead role in a film played by a trans woman about a trans woman. I didn’t realize the emotional impact it would have on me. I cried profusely in the theater. Later I was so in love with A Fantastic Woman that I made a film, including replicas of some of the props, a love letter to the trans actress Daniela Vega, and a choreographed recreation of a specific scene from the film at Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin. The gallery was able to obtain the rights to play the film three times a day, like a movie theater. I wanted people to see and understand some of the hardships trans women face. bell hooks talks about mass media’s ability to shape the way people think about other people, more specifically marginalized people in this context. I wanted people also to see a film where a trans woman is living her dream in the end by being an opera singer—showing my baby trans self that trans people can achieve their dreams too.
Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies), 2022. Performance, June 18, 2022, Scala Basel, Switzerland. Courtesy of the artist and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.
I grew up thinking transitioning = death and also damnation in the next realm. Maybe I would have come out sooner if I’d seen an actress like Daniela Vega. On the flip side, I have heard from other trans people, and experienced it myself, that more visibility can lead to more violence (emotional, physical, and/or spiritual violence) and even murder or suicide. We live in an anti-trans world which can be attributed to many things including the colonization of countries whose indigenous cultures accepted and even cherished trans, nonbinary, two-spirit + people. The need to force religious conversion and/or enslave indigenous peoples all over the world also lends itself to transphobia, or trans hatred, as I like to call it.
I’ve been appearing nude in my work for years since I started hormone replacement therapy. I recently had a 3D scan of myself nude made into a bronze sculpture with a green patina. The problem for many transphobic people boiled down to seeing a representation of a person with certain genitalia (some people like to call it a penis, but I enjoy calling it my clit) standing on a plinth that spelled out WOMAN. The sculpture was on a public street in the center of Basel. I watched people spit on my self-portrait, purposefully let their dog piss on the plinth, or theatrically avoid the work altogether. I received DM’s and comments on Instagram with death threats and a plethora of transphobic remarks. My phone number was leaked and I started to receive voicemails, calls, and texts on my phone, some of them telling me to kill myself.
Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies), ‘A sculpture for Trans Women A sculpture for the Non-Binary Femmes A sculpture for Two-Spirit People • I am a woman. I don’t care what you think • (Transphobia is everywhere and everyone is susceptible to enacting it at any moment) (Unlearn the transphobia brewing within) I am a Trans Women. I am a Two-Spirit Person. I am a Woman. This is for my sisters and siblings everywhere. History erased many of us but we are still here. I will fight for our rights until the day I die. Exile me and I’ll keep fighting.’, 2022. Bronze cast on engraved brass base, 75 x 24x 24 in. Installation view, Art Basel Parcours, Basel, June 13–19, 2022. Courtesy of the artist, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Galerie Balice Hertling, Galerie Barbara Weiss, and Galerie Francesca Pia. Photo: Vincent Blebois.
We have been erased from history as well as art history. We were kept in the closet, purposefully omitted, forced into conversion, murdered, imprisoned, silenced, and exiled. There are some examples of our bodies in art history that have survived, true, but I would say many were from the gaze of cis men. I think something to question in regards to increasing visibility is if it can provide healthcare to trans people, if it can provide employment in a non-transphobic space, if it can provide housing and food for trans people, if it can keep trans people safe from emotional harm and from physical harm or death. The percentages still show that trans people are disproportionately and negatively affected in all of these areas. I am holding on to the hope that I can make work that emphasizes the transphobic nature of the society we live in and attempts to make changes in the perceptions of some of the viewers. I know if I had been in a museum as a teen looking at contemporary art and I stumbled upon work that conveyed the changes in a trans artist’s body over time, it would have changed my life.
Handout from Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies) performance, June 18, 2022, Scala Basel, Switzerland. Courtesy of the artist and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles.
PH: I remember seeing so many horrific reactions to your nude bronze at Art Basel. It made me consider how illusory the endorsements the “progressive” art world gives us usually are. Years ago, when I first met you in Los Angeles, I have to confess, you were in many ways an equivalent of Una mujer fantástica to me. My baby trans self was gifted a lot of possibility from our conversations, and simply your presence—talking about tumors, hormones, aspirations toward nuanced presentations to the world, and chilling with a dog named Spiderman. And there were lots of green heart emojis in our texts! Actually, tell me about the color green.
JO: I started the green works ten years ago. I wanted to get to some sort of minimal, basic foundation in painting and that was the mixing of colors—the mixing of blue and yellow to make green. I started to try and make everything in my life fit this color code, from bedding to clothing to dishes and furniture, even food and drinks. The combining of the two colors relates to me being a mixed-race person, green being one of the most ubiquitous colors on the planet and blue and yellow complimenting this natural global omnipresence. Blue and yellow conjure moods and green conjures the blood of plants. My father’s indigenous ancestors migrated from the jungles of South America to the jungles of the Caribbean. I can’t help but think about being enveloped in the greens of the places they traversed and inhabited. It’s a color that allows for many interpretations, from green screens to nature, from money to recycling, from traffic lights to camouflage, and I’ve been interested in conveying as many associations as I can.
Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies), ‘A sculpture for Trans Women A sculpture for the Non-Binary Femmes A sculpture for Two-Spirit People • I am a woman. I don’t care what you think • (Transphobia is everywhere and everyone is susceptible to enacting it at any moment) (Unlearn the transphobia brewing within) I am a Trans Women. I am a Two-Spirit Person. I am a Woman. This is for my sisters and siblings everywhere. History erased many of us but we are still here. I will fight for our rights until the day I die. Exile me and I’ll keep fighting.’, 2022. Detail. Bronze cast on engraved brass base, 75 x 24 x 24 in. Courtesy of the artist, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Galerie Balice Hertling, Galerie Barbara Weiss, and Galerie Francesca Pia. Photo:Vincent Blebois.
PH: I’m thinking about the green patina that forms on bronze—though how differently the European and American public interpret the monumentality of an aging, green sculpture of a person versus the monumentality of a tree or plant. So many European tides of empire and colonization are encoded in the green of their monuments, so many bids for exploitative control. It echoes less-green monuments in our mass media, which remains obsessed with the linear, categorized, human body. It always brought me some comfort to see that monumentality transmuting in what you do—in the mascot figures of your previous performances such as SpongeBob (Love, Bob Esponja, 2015), or your body at Hannah Hoffman, or your use of green. Green feels like a new type of monument in your hands, one which gives permission to be so many forms and shapes of personhood. It’s important for trans people to cradle and dictate these emerging monuments, or lack thereof, to redistribute these colors and their powers on perception—to not only fight a homogenous understanding of what an ideal body ought to be, but to question what a single color can be. Thank you so much, Jade.
JO: Thank you for giving me this platform to speak. If I think back to being a child, I was as silent as possible because I felt my feminine voice would give me away. I longed to have a voice and express myself and now I’m able to create platforms where others in our community can do the same. It reminds me why I’m doing what I do. Sending love always. Hahom. x
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) lives and works in New York. She is the recent recipient of Toby’s Award, given every two years by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work was featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 9th Berlin Biennale, and X Nicaraguan Biennale.
PHILTH HAUS is an art and design collective of 6 member-clients represented by ANDRA. Each member aspires to transcend to a realm in which the planet and body are made one via globalized economies, identity semiotics, and biological contamination. The collective is currently based in Los Angeles and Berlin.