I’m A Peacock — Alberto García del Castillo

For Gerrit Rietveld Academie’s Studium Generale 2021 I’ll read some texts to explain how I’ve been involved in nontraditional processes of translation, and how I experienced those processes as tools for queer collective arts making and for the self-training of new skills. I’ve titled this presentation “I’m A Peacock,” honouring a line from the subtitles for the video Performance by Ocaña and Camilo (Video-Nou, 1977) that I wrote in 2016. Where a character in the video sang “Soy pecadora” (I’m a sinner), I misheard “Soy pavo real” (I’m a peacock) and accordingly wrote that line. I wrote those subtitles for a video program that I curated, and which was commissioned by (link: https://www.apologiantologia.net/db/?… text: Apología/Antología) and (link: https://hamacaonline.net text: Hamaca), two Barcelona video art archiving initiatives.

I, Alberto García del Castillo, am a Castilian-Manchegan queer arts writer and administrator concerned with counter normative processes of arts making. I’m currently researching on queer collective approaches to Risk Reduction in residency at Kaaitheater in Brussels and I co-run the Brussels based queer arts initiative Buenos Tiempos, Int. I’ve published four books, Vava Dudu, Merman, Midpoint and Retrospective, contributed to specialized arts and queer culture periodicals like Girls Like Us, Petunia, Trigger and YEAR, and performed internationally.