Can we love those we don’t know?

Who Look at Me, June Jordan’s 1969 publication, holds the beautiful and evocative lines that give this exhibition its title: “New energies of darkness we/ disturbed a continent/ like seeds.” These new energies of darkness might have referred to the world transformation underway just a year before Jordan’s writing: 1968 marked an important flashpoint for uprisings as widespread organizing against war, racism, capitalism, and militarization unfolded transnationally. At the height of this moment, amidst ongoing movements for Black Pride, the American poet June Jordan, created Who Look at Me, a mixed-genre book that pairs her poetry with drawings, paintings, and sketches or lithographs selected and edited by historian Milton Meltzer, depicting artists who ask us to look at Black identity differently. In this sense, it prepares us, too, to engage with the works of La Chola Poblete, against a political backdrop not entirely dissimilar: current worldwide protests against wars and genocide echo the political climate of the late ’60s, in which Jordan disturbed a continent, challenging those who thought there was only one way of looking. The seeds that Jordan spoke of now flourish in Poblete’s photographs, paintings, and installations.

In Who Look at Me, Jordan actively challenges our ability to really look at her, to really see, within systems of white supremacy that continue today. We find in La Chola’s work a similar demand to connect with her not as a single, unified individual, but as one constituted by all the identities she embodies. Her gaze confronts us with the question: How can we truly see those who Western hegemonic epistemologies have taught us to continuously erase? 

In Il Martirio di Chola (2014) La Chola Poblete is portrayed in three-quarter profile, as if disinterested in the viewer. But if we look closely, her sideways glance seems to be watching us. Beside it hangs the photograph American Beauty (2017), in which the artist stares directly at us, eyes wide open and extended by long eyelashes (if she blinked we would fall on our backs). Her bright pink painted lips hold a rose made of potato chips, and her long and thick black braided hair hangs down, as in Il Martirio, but here to rest upon a dress of purple, blue, and pink sequins that call to mind forms of American pop culture. On the same wall as these two images, the artist has produced a collage in the form of in-situ murals or graffiti. These paintings and drawings defy the hegemonic reading of “primitive art.” Yes, there are religious signifiers—Catholic ones—and figures whose symbolic representation and imaginaries connect with Argentinian culture and beliefs. There is representational painting, and a certain naivety, or what we could easily read as “folk art” in La Chola’s work. These imaginaries are what, through Western thought, we have been taught to read as “primitive” art—that classification of non-Western societies and/or, what history has classified as untrained or self-taught artists, meant to idealize the experience of an elementary time, place, or people. Yet, like Jordan, La Chola Poblete insists on the question: Can we look at her? Yes, but we need new eyes. Not eyes that would see her as primitive, but eyes that can hold her in all her complexities.

Painted on the wall, as if graffitied, are two heads in profile with the same long braids suspended in the air. One braid is held by a hand colored in what we, in Latin America, know as the color carne, which literally translates to “meat,” but refers to the apparently neutral color of skin, or “flesh.” We were taught in school that the color of the skin, carne, was a soft pink. But when we looked at each other, we saw another tone: some of us, with carne skin, a majority black and brown. The lesson we were taught was, as theorist Nelson Maldonado Torres would say, the coloniality of being: those with soft pink skin were endowed with flesh, those with darker skin were…not? When looking at La Chola’s work, I am reminded of these lessons. Can we look at her? Yes, but we need new eyes, eyes that can recognize and distinguish flesh in all its forms.

The other braid is cut in half by a knife that is dripping with blood, which might be confused with the blood spurting from the crown of thorns painted above. The carne-colored hand that grasps the first braid seems to have fallen, and here it shakes hands with another bright pink head that emerges like a cactus from a can of Quilmes—a traditional drink from Argentina. To whom do these stylized carne-colored fleshy hands belong? Fragmented, the hands read to me like stand-ins for traditional Argentinian identity—one that La Chola severs and challenges on these walls.

Much of La Chola Poblete’s work presents juxtapositions inherent to the demands to look at her. She embodies both resistance and the coloniality of being that Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter theorizes as a critique of the Western, bourgeois, and Eurocentric notion of “man” that has defined how we all exist. Can we look at La Chola Poblete and her art? Yes, but not in the ways we have been taught to look. We can see her with new eyes, eyes trained through a deciphering practice, in line with Wynter’s thinking. That is, through uncovering the ways in which aesthetic philosophy's autotelic work of art is a function. Instead of trying to interpret what La Chola Poblete’s work represents, we might ask: What is it doing? It is demanding that we look at her multiple, embodied selves, that we engage them all at once. In looking, she suggests, we confront our own gaze, and are stripped of its exoticizing tendency, its romanticizing of the primitive.

In Who Look at Me, Jordan affirmed that “we do not see those we don’t know.” For Jordan, love depends on the encounter of oneself in another. The only way to know is through deciphering. Deciphering is a praxis, not just a disembodied theory; it is a thinking-feeling engagement between an individual and the social structure. When we can love, only then can we see. And when we really see, how could we hurt? And so we turn to La Chola Poblete’s question, written on this same wall: “Do you really want to hurt me?” In Jordan’s words, posed differently, the question continues to resound: Can we love those we don’t know? At different moments in history, the energies of darkness meet, disturbing a continent. La Chola continues to contest hegemonic ways of seeing and therefore, of loving.

Susana Vargas Cervantes teaches, writes, and curates. She is internationally recognized for her artistic work at the intersections of alternative criminology, visual studies, and queer studies—in both Anglo North America and Latin America. She has co-curated exhibitions at Tate Britain, Museo Jumex, and Ford Foundation Gallery. After a Fulbright stay at Columbia University, she joined Carleton University as a Professor in Communication and Media Studies. Her work has been featured in Frieze, I-D, Vice, El País, CBS Inside Edition, among others. She is the author of the book The Little Old Lady Killer: The Sensationalized Crimes of Mexico’s First Female Serial Killer (NYU Press, 2019) made into a Netflix Documentary, Mujercitos (Editorial RM, 2015) and Service Top, Bad Bunny: mirando la' estrellas sin telescopio (Gato Negro 2023). She is currently working on her first documentary feature film: El Bautizo de la Chilaquil, the untold story of female (homo)sexuality in Mexico.