Furia Part 1: PACHAQUEER
Comprised of the two “gender monster” artists CoCa and MoTa, the Ecuadorian art duo PACHAQUEER began collaborating in 2013. They create performances, demonstrations, parties, and music through what they describe as “self-managed practices based on anarchy-trans-feminisms,” which function “against patriarchal violence” (radiococoa). PACHAQUEER mobilizes perversity and abjection through a contrasexual identity that intersects with critical drag[1], countercultural transgender anarchism, and epistemological systems rooted in the aesthetics of “dissident transvestism” (radiococoa).
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[1] While the influence of critical drag art can be felt in the shadows of the mainstream, its most vital manifestations occur within other artistic and social scenes. Critical drag aligns itself with the aesthetics and politics of the Riot Grrrl and Queercore movements, anti-establishment gay punk rockers, goth subcultures, and works within the “horror” genre. It brings disruption to these scenes, with practitioners playing with and embracing their outsider status. They disparage authority and delight in unmasking oppression. There is an embrace of contradictory sexualities, at times aligning with transgender political movements and at other times sitting outside of them.
It is important to note that PACHAQUEER does not identify with the term “drag.” The curator employs it here strictly within the context of the theoretical framework of "critical drag" as defined above.
CoCa & MoTa - PachaQueer, Arte Actual FLACSO,
Quito - Ecuador - mayo 2016
photo: Maria Emilia Escudero @puta.astronauta
The artivists’ names—CoCa and MoTa—and their proclamation as PACHAQUEER are politically charged and polymorphous. CoCa and MoTa refer to plants used to produce ancestral medicines (the coca plant and marijuana—mota being a slang term for the latter in Latin America). On the surface, this presents the duo as a force of disobedience and hedonism. However, in a country embroiled in violent clashes with drug cartels that use its territory as a transit point for the international narcotics trade, choosing these names becomes an act of reclamation. It is a sovereign act that counters how their bodies are inscribed and consumed within the illicit economies that insist upon their subjugation.
Furthermore, the artists’ chosen names invoke the sacred nature these plants hold within cultures of the Southern Hemispheric Americas. In an Andean context, for example, the Inca referred to coca as the “Divine Leaf of Immortality.” Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis, who has explored the sociocultural significance of psychedelics globally, explains that “Coca is less a high than a meditation. The etiquette of hallpay, the totality of the act of using the plant—the exchange and salutations, the way one places the leaves in the mouth, the attitude of reverence and respect—in a very real sense defines what it means to be Runakuna, a child of Pachamama” or “Mother Earth” (mckenna.academy). Davis connects coca use to a deeper existential meaning within Andean cultures: “To chew coca is to transcend self and become part of the social, moral and spiritual nexus that gives meaning to life. To be without coca is a form of social and spiritual death, an excommunication from existence itself” (mckenna.academy).
The artivist CoCa energetically embodies these multiple meanings through a commitment to an artivism that regards artistic visions as spiritual visions. They act as a kamikaze terrorist for the emancipation of gender freaks within their community, celebrating diversity by embracing outsider gender “monsters.”
CoCa & MoTa - PachaQueer, Arte Actual FLACSO,
Quito - Ecuador - mayo 2016
photo: Maria Emilia Escudero @puta.astronauta
As a psychoactive drug when smoked or ingested, marijuana/cannabis has a distinct history within Southern Hemispheric American cultures. It was “introduced to Latin America not once but several times in the 16th century” (Warf 425). Geographer Barney Warf, who has catalogued the historical geography of cannabis, details its arrival as follows: “from Angola, slaves brought cannabis to Brazil in the 16th century as an intoxicant (although Portuguese sailors may have provided another transmission mechanism).” From the Amazon, its use spread to fishing villages and longshore labourers along the coast, and from there into mestizo cultures throughout the continent, where it became known as the “opium of the poor” (de Pinho 293). By adopting this name, MoTa aligns themself with these mestizo pharmacological practices, which connect colonized peoples across vast territories of the Americas. Within these traditions, the psychotropic is recognized as a magical link between human physical and metaphysical existence.
Multiple meanings are embedded within the words “Pacha” and “Queer,” which form the moniker PACHAQUEER. Although “pacha” has come to mean “baby’s bottle” in places like El Salvador and Nicaragua, its original meanings derive from Incan mythology and the Quechua language, where it represents the intrinsically linked concepts of Earth, universe, and time. This linkage is central to the Andean conceptualization of “space-time” (Manga Qespi), which distinguishes between “pacha, this world; ukhu pacha, the world from inside; hanaq pacha, the world above” (Diccionario Quechua).
Western thinking understands the time-space continuum differently, most recently through the special theory of relativity and a four-dimensional model. However, these conceptualizations were developed outside the phenomenological frameworks of Indigenous peoples throughout the Hemispheric Americas, many of whom possessed complex understandings of time and space. In these worldviews, time was intrinsically linked to every natural element, and reality was “imbued with higher significance, such that even the most modest of creatures can be seen as a teacher, and the smallest grain of sand is a mirror of the universe” (Davis, Wayfinders 142).
I propose that by incorporating “pacha” into their pseudonym, CoCa and MoTa intentionally invite spectators to decenter concepts of time and place from Eurocentric colonial models and reorient them toward the collaborative interstitial—the space/time between.
In my travels throughout the
Hemispheric Americas, artists and academics have often explained to me
that “queer” is a relatively recent import into the popular vernacular
of Central and Southern political communities concerned with sex and
gender identity. The term's journey from a homophobic slur in the
Northern Hemisphere to a more expansive affirmation of sexually diverse
identities arrived as an academic and activist concept. It is
significant, then, that CoCa and MoTa do not use the Spanish adaptation
“cuir,” but instead choose the root English word, “queer.” From my
discussions with the duo, I understand this as a deliberate act of
reclamation, allowing them to re-center and reframe the concept through
their own artistic and political actions.
As MoTa explains, they recognized that “at some point queer was emptied of content and replaced by consumerism. Then 'cuir' or 'kuir' was adopted by the academy and so we refused that as well... Early on, we employed ‘kuy,’ the Quichua term for the guinea pig, because we had heard that it is impossible to determine its biological sex. The guinea pig also lived inside the houses of the Indigenous cultures of the region, because they believed they had the power to feel and read people’s energy. Also... because they are well known as animals that love to fuck!” (interview, MoTa).
Working within a creative and fluid interpretation of space-time, PACHAQUEER embraces furia (the Spanish word for “rage”) as a strategy for self and societal transformation. This eruptive and disruptive force is central to their practice, drawing from the “fierceness” of political drag art predecessors and the struggles of Ecuadorian trans activists. They cause a scene in public—sometimes intentionally as performers, at other times simply through their disobedient gender presentation, which mixes cyber-punk with club-kid, the circus’s bearded lady with gay BDSM fetish signifiers, clownish grotesque with high-fashion glamazons. They insist on being seen, while refusing to be fixed to a single look. This continual mutation critiques the socio-sexual normative need to fix the gaze and categorize authenticity in the public domain. Outwardly, they present as gender (r)evolutionaries: frightful goddesses of vengeance, present-day furies.
They are the monstre sacré made manifest.
CoCa and MoTa, Museo Antropológico Y De Arte Contemporáneo
Guayaquil - Ecuador, Nov 2024
photo: Marnico @mar._.nico - colombia
PACHAQUEER is decidedly not a metaphor.
The duo's artworks and performances rely on the IRL—on the vital, physical relationship between spectator and performer. In their guerrilla actions staged outdoors, the spatial scenography and the humans interacting within it create a context where they can leverage, even weaponize, their perversity. It is within this live confrontation that PACHAQUEER harnesses the power of the explicit body to reveal the complex, promiscuous, and contradictory codes that render them subjects rather than fixed objects. This spoiling of the gaze engenders a (re)examination of the PACHAQUEER body. Through this process, CoCa and MoTa demonstrate the human potential for liberation from inherited, restrictive codes of socio-sexual and gender culture.
PACHAQUEER operates within a transdisciplinary practice and ethos.
They eschew the established circuits of mainstream festivals and venues—even those claiming to be alternative—in favor of clubs, music halls, demonstrations, cabarets, and parties. In doing so, they destabilize bourgeois concepts of “professionalism” and cross the borders of colonial respectability policed by a Western art world that has often ignored them.
Travestis del Infierno, Bunker Nightclub
Washington DC, EEUU, junio 2025
photo: @carishin.x & @ecuayorker
Although many PACHAQUEER performances emphasize a rage fueled by the oppression of the gender outlaw, they are also charged with an alegre rebeldia—works brimming with laughter and sardonic commentary. Through these performances, they personify the strategy of fabulous terrorismos, staging profane rituals that challenge spectators to join their emancipated, gender-shifting, and voguish monster revolution.
Their musical performances playfully mix a variety of styles, from electro-clash to reggaeton, and from North American hip-hop to South American cumbia. They use rhythmic speaking and rapping to deliver saucy political diatribes built on infectious repetition and bold declarations. Their catchy anthems—which they identify as “spells”—include Mi cuerpa es libre (My Body is Liberated), Furia Trans, and Tesão (Horniness).
As the duo does not play traditional instruments (save for percussive tools like tambourines), their performances are concisely staged. They arrive at an event in outfits specially created by PACHAQUEER for the moment, their music tracks in hand to pass to the DJ. Like queer, witchy evangelicals, they preach the PACHAQUEER philosophy to the crowd and—having whipped the assembly into an energized, bouncing, and chanting mass—disappear into the night.
Travestis del Infierno,
La Fiesta del Patio en Tv Eyes
en el Marco del Pre Pride NYC,
New York - EEUU, mayo 2024,
photo: JAVIER VASCONEZ VACA @bubu_jv - ecuador
Abre la cula/Open Your Ass
PACHAQUEER ft. Gambletron
Abre la cula/Open your ass
Cula/Ass
Dinero, progresso, poder en excesso/Money, progress, excessive power
Dinero, dinero, dinero, dinero/Money, money, money
CoCa, MoTa, Coca, MoTa
Para liberar hay que matar/To free you have to kill
Matar, Matar, Matar/Kill, kill, kill
Estamos en guerra civil/We are in a civil war
No, no, no!
Sacha la cuchilla/Take out the blade
Arma tu guerilla/arm your guerrilla
Voy comprando, voy mantando, voy violando/I'm buying, I'm keeping, I'm desecrating.
Voy golpeando/I’m punching
Voy callando/I’m silencing
Secuestrando y asustando/Kidnapping and frightening
Deplazando y torturando/Displacing and torturing
Es Violencia/It’s violence
Diva sudaca/South American Diva
Lembra la faça/Remember your knife
Es violencia/It’s violence
Abre la cula/Open your ass
Ni nada/nothing else
Spread your ass