A Conversation with Vir Andrès Hera: On Layered Gazes

Vir Andrès Hera and I met at a commune. It was in 2021, at Triangle – Astérides, in Marseille. I was working there; Vir was part of the artist-in-residence programme, and we spent three months working and growing together, alongside Ziphozenkosi Dayile, Belinda Zhawi, Rosa Joly and many others. For my part, I can say that this summer has been a turning point in the way I built myself as an artworker, a curator and a friend. Since then, the conversation has never stopped, fuelled by the mutual invitations we have extended to one another.

Vir Andrès Hera is an artist whose work has many layers. It is as if each piece were composed of multiple threads to be pulled, offering as many paths to explore and stories to discover. Their work is the sort you return to time and again, learning something new each time. By inviting them to contribute to Tide Magazine, I wanted to continue our ongoing conversation on challenging the writing of a single hegemonic history and on the strategies they employ to propose alternative, multifaceted and nuanced narratives. Their use of allusion, together with the rich complexity of their moving images, crafts stories that bring together a multitude of eras, identities and perspectives, weaving a fruitful dialogue with previous contributions to these pages. But once again, Vir Andrès took me into unexplored corners of their practice offering new threads to unravel.

As we speak, where are you and how are you doing?

I am currently in Tlaxcala, the city where I was born, in Mexico. For the first time in eighteen years, I came back here on my own, without any French person to accompany me. I decided to travel from Mexico City airport alone: the only way is to use public buses. It was my own symbolic way of reclaiming my belonging to this territory. In my work, I tackle the notions of displacement and diasporic identities. Living in France often makes me wonder if I am the right person to carry this narrative, and how to do it in a way that feels right. Being far from this reality urges you to ask yourself these questions. But as I was waiting for the bus that would take me home, I fully returned to my body and to reality, and I understood why it is so important for me to address these experiences.

Language is a key aspect of your practice, which you approach in a very tangible way, through writing and translation, particularly within the Qalqalah collective. It also runs through your visual (Bakhtiniana, 2026; Amoxtli, 2024) and performance works (The Sacred Without World, 2025; At the Limit of the Otherworldly Limit of the World, 2025) as well as in the workshop format you are developing, which places at its core texts written by others (Todo comienzo es un ensayo, 2026). Could we discuss how language is as much a field of research as it is a working method for you?

I left Mexico with a heavily westernized Mexican culture, both colonized and colonial. Moving to France shifted the racial regime I existed in, it didn't hand me tools that didn't exist back home. In Mexico, mestizaje had already positioned me somewhere specific, not white, not outside race, just differently. Being reread as a minority in France made that positioning legible in a new way, and pushed me back toward what was already there in Abya Yala. That shift triggered a lot of questions, and led me to keep exploring the impact of colonization. First with the colonial legacy of the Catholic church and its symbols in Mexico, and then through the voices and languages that were ignored and unheard, often because we don't really want to listen to them, or we don't have the tools to fully understand them.

In terms of methods, I would say that talking about your work implies choosing a language that is designing the version of yourself you present to the world. Very practically, I was confronted with this question when I released my new website, which is part repertoire, part archive of all my projects. When building it, as in working with languages, I wondered how to dismantle hierarchies, how to be fair, and how to be funny.

Your practice is transdisciplinary; you engage in performance, photography, video and text-based work. Regardless of the final form, these different mediums run through your practice, with many of your works unfolding over extended periods of time. One of our first conversations centred on the conditions under which the gaze is produced, a question that also lies at the heart of your work with images. Could we discuss how you conceive and construct images, and more specifically the relationship between film and performance?

The “repertoire” and “archive” terminology I was using earlier in relation to my website has been theorised by the Mexican-American art historian Diana Taylor¹. Some things belong to the archive, such as films, books, printed materials, as they can be looked at; others belong to the repertoire, as they are kept in our bodies and can only be reactivated through them. But sometimes something can be both. In my film practice, there is no rehearsal or script, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t prepared, quite the opposite actually. I prepare by bringing together a group of people and a series of circumstances, so that the film can be improvised, like a performance, with freedom. At the same time, I came to realise that I conceive my performances like films as, through them, I offer images that I construct almost photographically, anticipating how to display my own body in space. My performances are therefore constructed like images, and my films are more experimental, like performances. But both are informed by the notion of drag, disguised as something else.

My film practice paved the way for me to accept that I could be a performer. For a long time, I was a performer in the closet. The performers in my videos would also often tell me that I, too, was acting as such in the way I was filming them. So I stopped watching. I stepped to the other side, turning my own body into an image.

The first performance I did after my “coming out”, was a site-specific work at Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, invited by Thomas Conchou, in dialogue with Swiss Alpine landscape paintings. Nature is part of the colonial relation between bodies and landscapes. Hiking is inherited from the European explorers of the nineteenth century and English or German traditions of the eighteenth century, themselves rooted in the colonial expeditions of the Spanish and Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Our relation with nature has long been shaped by the desire to dominate a territory and I found it important to question my own practice of hiking.

In this performance, as well as in Lo Sagrado, Sin Mundo (2025), I examine this figure of the hiker, and through it, the one of the mestizx, de-indigenised person. As for us, mestizo people with indigenous ancestry, the possibility of relating to our Indigenous origins was taken away from us. The performance therefore introduces a series of personae, derived from an indigenous masculine figure reclaiming space. This comes from the tale Blame the Tlaxcaltecs by the Mexican author Elena Garro, who describes a pre-Columbian character returning to show his wounded body as a reminder for the stolen time to seek revenge for the time that was stolen from them. The work unfolds through anachronism and the superimposition of subjectivities that can coexist within a single twenty-first-century body, where diasporic and displaced people navigate dynamics and spaces of both the colonised and the coloniser.

The concept of multiple subjectivities was already present in your film work, where you draw on different perspectives to explore alternative ways of writing history and propose non-hierarchical, polyphonic narratives. Your works are often collaborative and/or rooted in long-term professional and personal relationships. Could you explain this necessity, this choice?

The word “worlding” which I use as a category on my website, was coined by María Lugones² and refers to the ability of people of colour to move through the world while being many. For instance, I am as much someone who comes from Tlaxcala, in Mexico, as a person of colour living in France. These are two subjectivities, two gazes, within one being. Part of my practice does not take the form of films or performances, but is more intangible, and I was wondering how to make space for these immaterial aspects that inform my work so profoundly. My answer has been to create groups and spaces for others to speak up through my work. Can encounters be considered artworks?

With Qalqalah, a collective platform for research and artistic production on translation, I lean into this. My work as an art school teacher also urges me to reconsider collaborations and relations of power; and the part we, as organisers, should play with all stakeholders: be they students, communities, art professionals, technicians, researchers or other teachers. In my artistic approach, both as artist and professor, I put myself in a continuous position of not knowing: as a teacher, I’d choose a text I don't really understand, or haven't already read, as a base for discussion and learning for all. I think of my work as a constellation: I remain at the centre of my practice while recurring guests — members of my family, friends, institutional partners — stay with me through the course of many years, helping me renew my own understanding as I share my tools with others. This creates a reciprocity—both financial and spiritual—that enables us to move forward together, reimagining artistic practice as a collective endeavour while recognising my responsibility to create space for others alongside me.

On that note, could we talk about the artistic and narrative strategies you employ? More specifically in the films Le Daftar and Amoxtli, and in your forthcoming one? Can cinema be a collective endeavour?

My series of films Le Daftar (2022), Amoxtli (2024) and Incwadi (upcoming) actually have the same title, which means “the notebook”, as it is conceived as a collective notebook in which different people are writing a piece of a story, of an anecdote, of a body work and of an image. It is a magical notebook presented as a video installation, so the viewer doesn’t have access to the entire story, just some parts that appear and disappear like a palimpsest, as the writing is constantly being renewed, deleted and recreated.

I am highly interested in how we can collectively create a form of opacity, thanks to the plurality of the voices that carry a political and aesthetic statement. Our voices become one, protected by the collective and the anonymity it carries. It's also based on displacement between the South, without the intermission of the North: part of this trilogy is to imagine a future in which the queer subjectivities of the South can discuss without intermediation. I also came to realise that it was not a story between two continents but three: the Americas, Europe and the African continent are sharing a transatlantic colonial history. Therefore I am interested in unveiling how knowledge is informed by these continents at the same time. This is why the films are unravelling in their geographies, where I got the chance to do fieldwork and research (Portugal, Mexico and South Africa). These three contexts are of course quite different leading to different modes of collaboration with the performers on set. Le Daftar gathered artists based in Europe from various diasporas, all connected by this shared experience of migration. For Amoxtli, in Mexico, the situation was very different as I was a Mexican artist based in Europe, working with a production team from Europe and performers based in Mexico, on a set with its own political and cultural context. I realised that my subjectivity, as I understood it, differed from how it was perceived by others. In the field, I learned how to negotiate with this very real privilege and power I had in producing from Europe while taking into account the fragility of the context and fostering a dialogue. From this experience, I am now trying to anticipate what is to come in South Africa, where the film will bring together a team of people from different contexts of the Global Majority.

In such projects there is always friction, it has to be. But I can anticipate by building an organisation that takes into account what everyone needs in order to feel at ease during the process. Even if much is learned by doing, there are more and more resources within our artistic networks, which is crucial when undertaking a transnational collaborative practice that seeks to respect everyone’s boundaries. On set, we can be carried by collective energy, enter into dialogue and create material with which everyone can identify.

I now see my work as that of a filmmaker and a producer, but also that of a curator. A provocative statement perhaps, but it relates to how I take care of my collaborators, considering their personal paths and complexities. It requires availability and listening.

I find it interesting that you don’t separate care from the question of gaze, as for me, they are two sides of the curatorial practice, even if they are often considered as two different things. We look at and share what we think is worth seeing, but much of our work is about creating frameworks suitable for everyone. In your work, and I feel in mine too, the making of the gaze is closely tied to curatorial organisation.

In your practice, the conditions under which the gaze is produced have always been central. The ethic you develop rests on the polyphony of situated voices you bring together, as well as on the time you dedicate to working methods and concrete organisation. This is also reflected in your use of form, for instance in Le Daftar, you are using four different film techniques and the stories are split between screens.

Yes, and now, being in my mid-career artist crisis, I decided I urgently needed to experiment with sculpture. I have built a metal snake that, thanks to an audio device, is both listening and talking to the space. Which is not so far from the active listening practice that is part of my methodology - the difference now is that I am sharing it. But funny, isn’t it, how we have both moved from a practice centred on watching to one in which listening, rather than images, plays an increasingly important role?

I will now move on to my final question. And though it is the same one I ask everyone I interview, it feels particularly on point right now, talking of images and their erasure. What are you watching when you are on the internet, scrolling through social media? How do the internet and social media fuel your artistic work?

I watch a lot of reels on different platforms; my content is mainly LGBTQIA+ and connected to these communities in Mexico. For instance, I am interested in gay cowboys, who depart from a traditionally very masculine subculture, but appropriate in a very soft, feminised way. This led me to creating a piece, Brown boy as fiction, that I’ll present at FMAC Geneva. For this piece, I asked Mexican and Senegalese influencers to interpret two of my texts through reels. The texts draw from Muñoz’ writing on Brown subjectivity³, which explores what it feels to inhabit a body that is neither black nor white in the United States.

Photos

Projets Media-Gaudenzi (The Sacred Without World)
Maru Serrano (Lo Sagrado, Sin Mundo, Tercer Acto)
Hugo St-Laurent (Corps en jeu II)
Fred Dott (REST)
All other images: courtesy of the artist

¹ Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003.

² María Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia, vol. 2, no. 2, 1987.

³ José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown, Duke University Press, 2020.