Marcelo Sanchez-Camus - Interview

Marcelo Sanchez-Camus is a queer, Chilean artist, tutor and director of Applied Live Art Studio, with British and US citizenship. He has lived in the USA, Chilé, Columbia, Italy and the UK.

Marcelo's Portrait

Marcelo feels at home in many places, whilst emphasizing that doesn’t necessarily mean he can represent the national identity of those locations:

·       “I've been in the UK for 20 years and I very much feel like I'm home where I am. Sometimes people ask me “Are you going home for Christmas?” And I'm not sure what they mean because I'm already home. I love living in London. I feel very committed to living in London for the kind of life that I want.”

·       “Home is also where I was born, which is New York City. And both my parents being from Chile, I very much feel at home there and generally in Latin America.”

·       “When Ivy grows, it puts roots into a specific place and then throws another branch, and then sets another set of roots, and then throws another branch and another set of roots. I can relate to having multiple root structures.”

·       “I never particularly felt represented by the US and I don't know if I can represent that identity to others”.

·       “Between the ages of five to 18, I went to 14 different schools in two different countries. So, I moved schools a lot, and I was often the new kid in school. So, I did get used to being the new person in school, which was not very easy.”

Marcelo had a very efficient response when I asked him to describe his identity, whilst elaborating much further when describing his personality. He raised the complexity of cultural context, as well as reflecting on how his personality has shifted in response to his life experiences. He also mentioned his spirituality and connection with mythology and astrology:

·       “When you ask about my identity, I automatically would say I'm Latin x. I'm Queer.”

·       “Personality wise, I'm quite confident and outgoing. I like social situations, and I'm very comfortable speaking in front of people and speaking to strangers. I think it's why I engage in social practice, because I'm very politicized and I think having a good rapport with people is really important for that type of work. I’m a very open, honest and direct person, which is one of the things that sometimes I struggle with culturally in the UK, where people are not generally as direct, and it can be misread as overstepping.”

·       “I'm a big fan of astrology, because I really believe in how we interpret the myths that tell us who we are. I don't think there's much difference between mythmaking with astrology, gender and race. It's just how we interpret these stories to define ourselves, and I am interested in them as myths, but it doesn't mean that we don't live our lives by them.”

·       “People love to diagnose others. I don't feel like I need a diagnosis in order to be able to survive. I think there are people that are neurodivergent that really need support and that we should make caring space for their needs. Though I don't feel like I have that need, I'm aware that I’m an atypical thinker.”

·       “I was very introverted as a child, because I had a lot of trauma when I was young, and then I came out of my shell, and I was very extroverted for a while. But the collection of things that have happened over the last three years have made me feel more introverted, and my network is smaller now. Though I was more extroverted for a while, but I think I’ve leveled off.”

·       “I'm caring, I care about things and I make an effort. I’m easy going, generous and honest, and externally, I present myself as quite happy, even though I don't always feel that, but I spend more time walking around the world smiling than frowning.”

Marcelo detailed how his childhood experience of parental divorce and frequent displacement had resulted in bullying, as well as ongoing discrimination relating to his queer identity, especially since fathering a child. He described racial erasure within his own family history, and how he had creatively responded to frequent, micro-aggressive questioning about his ethnicity and origins:

·       “In my school in New York, when I was little, the first kind of issues of discrimination were because I was Latin American, and the whiter, more privileged kids, they were a bit racist, and I remember feeling discrimination. Then, when I was in Chile. It was because I had come from New York, and they would joke around and say, “Yankee, go home.”

·       “And then I remember feeling discrimination a bit because my parents were divorced and there was very little money. Me and my mom moved to this neighborhood called Washington Heights, which I have very fond memories of, but it was a rough neighborhood, and I couldn't go to the local high school because I was too light skinned as a Latin American and it was dangerous. From my DNA I'm 25% Indigenous American, and the rest is different Euros with some North and West African. And so, I did experience prejudice for being light skinned in that neighborhood as well. I can really see things from multiple angles as a result.”

·       “Then it was discrimination around sexual orientation and being Queer, which I've definitely had multiple times. Recently with being married to a Scotsman and having a child, we face a lot of really difficult prejudices with the services and trying to speak to people about us being two fathers and co-parenting with a mum. People often think that one of us, ie. Me who is the donor dad, was in a relationship with the mum. Someone from Children’s Services on the phone said to me ‘you had a baby with your ex, and you broke up and you're gay now’. It was just shocking. I verbalized the actual family narrative and then they spun back this completely made-up story.”

·       “I definitely have lived a non-traditional lifestyle, and when I talk to people about the way I live my life, there can often be prejudice, either through my sexual orientation or the kind of parenting I'm doing, or my identity politics.”

·       “It doesn't happen as much anymore as it used to as I’m less open, and also it depends where you are. Sometimes you have a conversation with an English person, and you're just talking about something normal, like politics, the weather, the news, your shoes, and then their statement in response to something you say is ‘where are you from?’ and it actually has nothing to do with what you're talking about but what you sound like. So, I created an artwork around it, a business card which listed my DNA. It would happen so frequently, I just gave people business cards - I'm not talking about this, here's the card.”

·       “The stories handed down from my family were mostly the stories of European migrants and the stories that were missing was the more indigenous blood. Although I knew my grandmother was Inca, from Peru, I also have a lot of Mapuche, which is the local indigenous group in Chile, but nobody in my family ever told me your great grandma is Mapuche because there’s structural racism in Chile and generally Latin American. It's a full erasure of, the indigenous, First Nation people. It's sad, because it's one of the things about my culture and my blood that I feel very proud of. The colonization of Latin America was just so brutal, and the narrative continues. I also have 2% from Senegal - that's so cool. I've always loved Senegal. I have no idea how that entered into my bloodstream but it carries the burden of the middle passage.”

Marcelo expressed his joy at bringing his like-minded friends together, and has found belonging in queer and artist communities:

·       “There are places and moments in my life where I felt like I fit in, like when I went to art school or when I discovered the queer parent’s group that I now help run. I generally walk around world feeling like I'm just here visiting from Outer Space and then there's little moments where I feel like I fit in.”

·       “One of the things that I really like doing, because I don't like having disparate groups of friends that don't know each other, is to bring people together and then they maybe get to establish their own friendships. I like to have parties and get-togethers and dinner parties to connect people with each other.”

·       “We've become really close to a single mum. She's got a four year-old and a two year-old. She lives not far from us, in a very kind of similar, slightly precarious position and all of our kids are mixed race. And we have come together to create a little bit of an alternate family. So, the kids meet up and play together, and we support each other, and that's been really nice. I think that's been really beneficial for the children as well,”

Marcelo’s described his environmental passions for sustainability and how that has informed his lifestyle, such as eating a plat-based diet:

·       “I would like to leave the world a better place than I found it. I would like to live with as much low impact as I can. I would like to feel that I'm connected to this living ecosystem of the planet and trying to curb my like destruction of it.”

·       “I'd love to see land taken away from animal husbandry and handed over to rewilding. I do some work on that I steward some woodlands. I eat plant based. I haven’t eaten animals for most my life now. I can’t really understand why people still do.”

Marcelo chose the colours of the sun, as well as monochrome colours for his portrait and flag. After exploring several options for symbols, he decided on the Andean cross, which he has as a tattoo, and the Japanese calligraphic symbol for the sun:

·       “My identity colors could be burnt orange color, black, white, grey and yellow.”

·       Marcelo’s tattoos include: “the Andean Cross, the Flower of Life, which is a seven sided star.”

·       “I am also really interested in Tarot. I'm quite drawn to like the Ace of Cups and the Ace of Swords has come up a lot in my life.”

·       “The Andean cross is this mystical connection between the Universe and the Earth. It sort of represents the mountain ranges. I really like those First Nation tribal designs.”

·       “I like the simplicity of the sun symbol painted in Japanese calligraphy. I started learning some Zen calligraphy, in my artist residency in Somerset. You take a breath and then make the circle with the breath and it’s this really instant practice with this aspect of mindfulness.”

·       “And then the Ace of Cups, I thought a lot about, because I was doing this artist residency along these reservoirs in rural Wales. And the Ace of Cups is about collecting all this water, which represents emotions. But its realization comes in the sharing, not in the collecting - and that's what I really like about it. It's a bit like those reservoirs of water, they only have a use when they share the water. They don't actually have a use when they're collecting water, it's in the sharing that they're most useful, and people get caught up in the collecting.”

·       “I don't mind if you skip the Ace of Cups. Combining the Andean cross and the sun might be interesting or be easier to combine visually.”

Marcelo's flag

When I sent Marcelo his flag he responded, “I think it’s more than just an art project and a piece of research, it’s a cosmic gift - so, thank you.”

Find all the interviews from my 'Kaleidentity' poject on my blog!