La Tortura (2006-2019) started during an extended stay in Buenos Aires, where I tried to make sense of queer desire in the streets of the Argentinian capital city.
The fast access to strangers in urban life, whenever pedestrians come close at a traffic light or queue up, or see one another through the windows of a vehicle, forms a web of impossible interactions. This bumping against each other I named 'La Tortura'. By calling desire torture, I echoed the reality of queer folks living under heteronormative pressures. Their senses, looks, and feelings must conform to other people’s gaze, censorship, or possibly, censorship.
I ended up recreating the queer gaze on the streets of cities as distinct as Lima, Havana, Athens, Los Angeles, and London. The series approaches the voyeur as a character that has lost authority, whereas its marginal position in social encounters has not yet disappeared.
Athens, 2009
Buenos Aires, 2008
Buenos Aires, 2008
Buenos Aires, 2008
Lima, 2011
Havana, 2008
Havana, 2009
Buenos Aires, 2008
