Don’t be scared. If you have difficulties reading Xandra Ibarra’s work, and subsequently, shy away from engaging with it—it’s okay, she wants to be incoherent. Is this violence? Debauchery? Self-loathing? Suffocation? Intimacy?
I thought about all the applications I’ve ever filled out in my life and how the most difficult ones are excessively restrictive. Mazes of checkboxes ask “what” I am, to determine if I deserve resources. If you have multiple layers of identities, navigating bureaucracy is always hostile; it feels like entering a game where you’ve already lost. By default, it invites filing errors or self-abnegation. The limitations are intentional, for bureaucratic sadism is the point.
Personally, I think being “The Model Minority” is a trauma response. As a person of Asian descent, this myth will always be intertwined with me—expected, even—this self-abnegation and self-hatred. To be visible and “accepted,” the Model Minority self-degrades to become a tool for white supremacy and gatekeepers. Out of survival, we become things.
Ibarra mentions this “minoritarian subjecthood” in her essay “Identity Is a Bureaucratic Nothing Attempting to Be Vital.” Maybe somewhere, I saw a curved dildo sculpture, pierced by surgical needles or crude descriptions: scum, menstrual, ass, strap ons. How I stumbled across this link I forgot, but a light bulb went off.
“It seems there’s an expectation that identity should be some naïve celebration, meant to work against the onslaught of images of suffering and state violence enacted upon racially identified bodies.”
Ibarra likens the funders as a shepherd and the artists as subordinate sheep, laboring model identities as commodities, “consumable for liberal satisfaction.” In my life, a filing error is expensive and prolongs institutional neglect. Outside of art, like the hospital, the insurance companies, the copyright office, the government—what is consensual power exchange with the machine? Ibarra’s persona, La Chica Boom, and her work seem to have germinated from doing chaotic shit in your bedroom—the last frontier of self-censorship. Maybe that’s why I like it. Even still, with self-excavation and humanness, it’s bureaucratically incoherent. I find joy in its illegibility. To audaciously waddle in the dark as the abject, the acceptance of being misfiled, that’s where power lies.