Worldbuilding Zé Kielwagen – Interview with Michele Jaslow
Worldbuilding Zé Kielwagen
Michele Jaslow
Michele: Your immersive installation BAFO! Beauty Temple is dedicated to honoring the life and imagined afterlife of Baby Bobolete, a beloved Brazilian queer clown and icon created by the late Caike Luna. During the run of the show, you invite visitors to sign up for a free haircut and beauty services in the immerse hair salon, flip through the zine you created for the occasion in the waiting area section, and leave an offering at the alter Exu Bobolete. What was the research like for this project?
Zé: For BAFO! Beauty Temple, my main reference was the artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s series of “monuments” dedicated to philosophers, the last and most ambitious being the 2013 site specific and participatory Gramsci Monument, an 8,000 square feet outdoor sculpture on the grounds of a Housing Authority development in the Bronx, New York.
While preparing for this exhibition I read Hirschhorn’s writings and watched his interviews. In one interview on the Gramsci Monument, he said that “it wants to create memory.” I love this idea that a monument, instead of being a structure that embodies and consolidates memories of people and events from the past, is an instance that creates memory by bringing people together, in the present. Memory, in historical terms, is always a collective creation. Hirschhorn’s monuments are also temporary and quite precarious, unlike the stone and bronze statues we often see in public space, created on the premise of some sort of immortality. His monuments are fleeting and dependent on ongoing community engagement. It speaks of the precariousness of memory and the labor that goes into maintaining it. There is something touching, and intensely political about it. I like this very much.
In a way, the BAFO! Beauty Temple at Open Source Gallery is also a monument. A monument to Baby Bobolete, to queer labor and queer workers everywhere. Just like Hirschhorn attempts to reinvent what monuments can be, I am attempting to reinvent temples and shrines.
