It Started with a Kiss

Jennifer Caroline Campbell discovers a hidden LBGTQ+ history embedded in carnival ephemera at Auto Italia in east London.

It all changed with a kiss. That is, according to scattered whispers, local gossip and anecdote. It was 1974 and carnival season in the plurinational South American state of Bolivia. A glamourous Las Chinas Morenas performer named Barbarella approached dictator Hugo Banzer Suárez, and gave him a kiss. The fragments of this story, the context that lead up to it, and its legacy, have been carefully gathered by David Aruquipa Pérez, a Bolivian artist, archivist and activist. He has worked with London based, Quechua-Spanish artist, Aitor González Valencia, to present this vital piece of history in an exhibition titled Barbarella’s Kiss at Auto Italia. The main focus of the exhibition is a collection of 41 photographs, which are laid out in minimal orderly fashion in brightly colored glass-topped vitrines. All from the pre-digital era, these photographs show their stories in their physical features as well as what the lens has captured. One is torn at the edge because it was hurriedly snatched from a photo album before a conservative relative could see it. In another a man’s face has been scratched out. Others are curling and scuffed on their white borders and one appears to have been reproduced as a postcard. 

 

Looking down into these crystalised moments is like glimpsing snatches of a temporary world, one that is brought into reality by the will of the performers. It reminds me of when I first saw the Casa Susannaphotographs, a collection of snap shots taken by cross dressers who regularly met up (and dressed up) in a particular house, during the 1950s in upstate New York. Although the context is very different, both collections of photographs have a snow-globe quality. To me they are like windows onto a contained realm, where temporary and communal freedom crackles and darts between glances, body language, fashion language and fake eye lashes. 

 

Both collections work to undo the willful forgetting that has been imposed on the rich history of non-conforming gender diversity, a history that the dominant narrative has only just begun to acknowledge. Both document a particular way of performing for the camera and an embodiment of temporary identities. But the spaces that these activities took place in are very different. The Casa Susanna photographs were, until their rediscovery, private. They were made of and for the guests at the Casa Susanna house and their small community. Rather than a by-product or even an intentional document they were instead a way of constructing a self. When discussing the Casa Susanna collection, professor of philosophy and cross-dresser Miggi Alicia Gilbert said ‘When you can’t be who you want to be, whenever you want to be it, then those images are a reassurance. They’re a recognition that say yes, I can do that, I can be that person as well as the one I happen to be now’. 

 

The photographs on show in the Barbarella’s Kiss exhibition feel more haphazard. The La China Morenaperformers were not allowed access to photography studios and appear not to have had a safe space to play in, like the Casa Susanna regulars did. Their posing is fierce, provocative, laced with political action and deep routed local beliefs about the plurality of identity. The way the performers hold the space in front of the lens somehow reverses that often exploitative power dynamic, where the person behind the camera has all the agency. Barbaralla and company are not subjected to the camera, they demand its attention.

 

Many of the snapshots were taken by photographers who would then sell them to the festival goers. In this sense these photographs become mementos of the festivities, and perhaps the novelty, of a carnival day. But there is a certain power contained in these mementos that lives on beyond the day of celebrations. The Barabrella’s Kiss exhibition made me think about how a temporary and elevated arena can provide a vital space for reimagining. In Ursula K Le Guin’s essay A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be (1983), she refers to Robert C Elliott’s idea of participatory festivals as temporary utopian intervals, that sit outside of daily time. She talks about them summoning the ‘dreamed-of golden age of equality’ into the present lived world. This imaginative transformation, she says, prevents utopian thinking from forming into that ever-promised future, that dangerous rationalist dream that so easily becomes totalitarian. 

 

In some of the photographs the performers are wearing traditional masks to protect their identity. In the later ones, the backdrops become more rural as the Las Chinas Morenas performers are forced out of the urban festivities, following their persecution after the fallout from that legendary kiss. Another change that happened after the kiss is that women were allowed to perform at the street carnivals, when previously they had been excluded. What is allowed within the confines of a carnival day is different from, yet has a real effect on, what happens outside of it. A line from Le Guin’s essay hangs in my mind: ‘the exiles from paradise in whom the hope of paradise lies’.

Jennifer Caroline Campbell

 

 

Barbarellas Kiss is at Auto Italia until the 11 June 2023.