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Amores Postmodernos

Published onDec 03, 2018
Amores Postmodernos

Featured image: Uy aqui y donde sea

Amores Postmodernos” a photographic series that explores queer subjects from Guatemala City with a contemporary narrative base of social media, sex, gender and sexuality created with religious symbolism as a way of proposing political disturbance to people that impose the norm by showing pleasure of a queer lifestyle. I want my work to render visible a community of humans that seek a queer heterotopia. As Michel Foucault suggests, “queer heterotopias are places where individuals can challenge the hereronormative regime and are free to perform their gender and sexuality without being qualified, marginalized or punish”.1

Fake, Glam and Grindr

Sexy, pink tinder date

All of the subjects are friends or strangers that were encountered through my daily life, via social media, hookup apps, or circles of friends that in their own way are disrupting gender norms by exploring and experimenting with crafting a queer identity.  In thinking, in particular, about how queer love behaves towards oneself or to others, it cannot be defined by the norm but is defined through sexual practice or aesthetically transforming one´s body in a way that seeks to disrupt a binary gender system. But what does it cost to challenge a society that still doesn´t recognize your identity? Just by pursuing pleasure through putting make-up on, wearing heels, a dress, kissing your lover in public or dressing in drag—any of these small actions allow bodies to take up space. But exposing a gender expression outside of the norm exposes fear, physical repression or even death to humans that identify as queer impose from a normative culture.Youth in the Guatemalan community started testing the limits of their cultural background, using gender and love to shape a political state of hate by reclaiming space and not conforming to sinking in by the norm.

Half Blood Millennial

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Martin F. Wannam was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala in 1992. His work and research address the influences of religion in Latin American societies, emphasizing the effect of repression that has been created in the queer community. Wannam uses subjects and objects that he encounters through his friends, drifting, or tinder dates to deconstruct and disrupt religion by addressing issues of gender, sexuality, and race. The artist currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is pursuing an MFA in Art Studio in the area of Photography. Previous to coming to the United States, he received a BA in Graphic Design from the Universidad Rafael Landivar and a Diploma in contemporary photography from La Fototeca, both in Guatemala. Wannam’s work has been included in exhibitions in Fototropia, Festival Quinto Sol, Fototeca, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and Rotterdam Photo 2018. His work has also been featured in queer magazines such as Reflection on the Burden of Men and La Fanzine. Wannam also received the SPE Student Award for Innovation in Imaging 2018 and Site Scholar in Site Santa Fe 2018-2019.

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