Dancing Against Extinction
Javier Ocampo's Queer folkloric visions turn kitsch, rage, and rave into weapons of survival
Javier Ocampo’s videos don’t ask politely to be watched. They crash the gates, hips first, demanding that you reckon with color, kitsch, and the body—his body—unruly, painted, prosthetic, brown, queer, sometimes dressed as a xoloitzcuintle in leather or as an iguana descending from a spaceship. Where others might whisper allegory, Ocampo turns up the volume until it rattles the teeth of respectability. He has no interest in being neutral. He is here to dismantle.
“Color is my passion,” Ocampo told an interviewer years ago, and you see what he means. His palette explodes, fades, and collides, always pulling the viewer into a zone where sex, violence, decadence, and tenderness refuse to stay separate. Raised in Cuernavaca in a working-class family, Ocampo has never pretended to come from the pristine halls of privilege. He insists that the everyday—the family photo album, a grandmother who poses nude for the camera, nephews playing with toys that ignore the pink-blue gender divide—is the true archive of art. “My family has been my accomplice,” he says. “Those intimate gestures are where the work begins.”
The intimacy doesn’t protect the work from offense. Quite the opposite. His now-infamous video El beso (te amo), in which he embraces and kisses statues of nationalist heroes in Morelos, was greeted with laughter, shock, outrage, and delight depending on the room. Shown in Mexico City, it drew chuckles and political side-eye. Shown in the Museo Jardín Borda, visitors filled the comment book with complaints. Ocampo remembers it all as confirmation. “For me, it was important that it generated something,” he says. “It was born out of loss and heartbreak, but it turned into a critique of the macho without feelings. Strangely, that personal vision turned out to be universal.”
Universality, for Ocampo, is never detached from locality. His works stage collisions between the textures of Mexican everyday life and the demands of queer survival. Think reggaeton blasting in the plaza outside a pyramid, or a prosthetic iguana tail swaying in a neon dive bar. His 2023 video Deculonizador takes this strategy to a delirious extreme. Draped in prosthetics and homemade costumes, Ocampo becomes an “iguana-putona” descending from a UFO, and later a rabid leathered xoloitzcuintle, to dance in front of Teotihuacán and Uxmal, as green-screen pyramids erupt behind him. The soundtrack: a pounding electro-reggaeton-marica anthem that reclaims slurs and spits them back as celebration. He calls it a practice of “dancing to deculonize the body,” a carnival of resistance where insult mutates into empowerment.
The joke, of course, is serious. Latin American queer theory has long warned against importing North American queer frameworks wholesale. The body marked as “naco” or “indio” in Mexico is not just queer—it is racialized, exploited, exoticized, historically erased. Ocampo’s body insists on being all these things at once. His performances topple the official story of mestizaje, that homogenizing myth that erased Indigenous difference in favor of a fantasy of unity. When he humps a bronze general or bites into a chocolate Olmec head, he makes visible the absurdity of how power curates history. When he suggests a clay warrior figurine could double as a dildo, he cuts to the quick: desire is never pure, never abstract, always entangled with conquest and memory.
The humor, the vulgarity, the sheer camp of it all—these are not decorations. They are the tools of survival. In a world where gay marriage has been assimilated into capitalism as proof of tolerance, Ocampo reminds us that queerness was never meant to be polite. “When discomfort disappears, so does courage,” he has argued. His work keeps discomfort alive, a necessary weapon against systemic whiteness and homophobia that smooth themselves into normalcy.
That edge sharpens again in his most recent project, Techno Guerreros. Here Ocampo moves from green-screen delirium to sculptural performance, merging rave culture with the layered history of Chimalacatlán, a Morelos archaeological site haunted by Tláloc offerings, Zapatista trenches, and Ice Age bones. He imagines four warriors, part armor, part reliquary, built of palm mats, clay, carrizo reeds, metal, and animal bones. They are protectors, guardians, ravers. They dance in fog and strobe light, their forms vibrating between past and future.
The videos of these Techno Guerreros show Ocampo staging what he calls a speculative archaeology: a rave that is also a ritual, a community that is also an uprising. Raves, like ruins, are places outside normal time. McKenzie Wark calls this “k-time”—a temporality without memory or expectation, where new forms of being flicker into existence. Ocampo taps into that current, letting the bass-line collapse centuries into a single beat. In his hands, the rave is not escapism but continuity: the same land that sheltered Zapatistas now shelters sweaty dancers under strobes. Protection and community are the through-lines.
Across these bodies of work runs a stubborn through-line of joy. Not naïve joy, but joy weaponized against extinction. Ocampo does not let violence, homophobia, or pigmentocracy have the last word. Instead he turns every slur into glitter, every insult into a dance move. He is not documenting tragedy. He is rehearsing survival. That is why his videos feel like both parody and prophecy: camp as critique, excess as insistence, dancing as world-building.
In the context of Dismantled, Ocampo’s work feels like an anchor. His practice dismantles the nationalist pedestal and the art-historical canon, the soft-focus assimilation of “love is love” campaigns and the harsh policing of queer brown bodies. He reminds us that art is not just a mirror but a weapon, not just an archive but a rave. The iguana-putona may look like a joke, but she is also a prophet, a guerrera, a reminder that the future belongs to those willing to dance in the ruins.
“Sometimes I think my work is both candid and perverse,” Ocampo once said. “But what matters is that it generates a reflection, a change.” Reflection, here, is not calm or distant. It is sweaty, neon-lit, unafraid of vulgarity, and absolutely committed to survival. In Ocampo’s world, folklore, queerness, and what Mexico calls lo naco—the tacky, the low-class—are not categories to escape but engines to build from. Together, they form the rave where history collapses, statues blush, and the future kicks in with the bass.
Javier Ocampo’s videos, including pigmentocracia and deculonizacion (2023), are featured in Vol 10: Dismantled, presented by The Bureau of Queer Art in collaboration with Maryland Art Place, Baltimore. On view September 11 – November 1, 2025, as part of the BROMO Art Walk.