The current work of Andres Payan Estrada focuses on the celestial (collages of disco balls) and the terrestrial (the weaving of dance floor images) which between the two offers a void of flux, a space of possibility; what theorist José Esteban Muñoz uses to illustrate queerness as ”a warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality”. [1] I have had the pleasure to know Andres Payan Estrada through their community engagement and curatorial work as Director of Public Engagement at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles, California. It was during a presentation of their work for an experimental platform The Fulcrum Project I was co-facilitating with artist Feather Chiaverini that Andres included their studio practice, speaking about the balancing of different modes of work. Since that moment their studio work has lived rent free in the back of my mind. This work hits on many things in my own research interests and practice with sharp precision. Using the lens of queerness, thinking with cruising and queer spaces the objects Andres creates become the material for the work I am interested in. 

In a video call with Andres in preparing this piece, I walked through their tedious process of collecting and capturing images of disco balls when attending happenings in queer dance and nightlife spaces. Andres only documents and catalogues each disco ball, making note of its place and time, and always careful not to include the bodies present in these spaces in the images as to not have attendees feeling surveyed. These are later printed, cut by hand and collaged together, creating a survey of glittering orbs which have been titled Many Moons. 

Scholar Michael Stevens has discussed the physics of the moon itself being a disco ball, the reflection and refraction of light would only offer brief glimpses of the earths reflection; offering an opportunity to see a version of ourselves. A chance for the macro of life to remind us of our small place in the universe [2]. Similarly, a disco ball in a club offers a chance to see ourselves or a representation of ourselves in some form, even for a brief glimpse. A shiny place in the sky for bodies to gather under. 

Similarly to their documentation of disco balls, Andres also documents and catalogues the floors of these queer gatherings as they come to an end. A conclusion of a moment and dispersion back into daily life, a grounding reminder of our terrestrial existence off the dance floor. This tracing of floors acts as a mapping of the ghostly trails of bodies that once inhabited the space, showing the cigarette butts, the broken bottles, and the remains of spilled drinks from energetic dancing or bumping into others. These images are then outsourced to be woven into tapestries. In the first iterations of these pieces some of the detritus was directly sewn onto the woven images. This has evolved into the process of taking the broken glass found on the floors to be flame worked by Andres into glass beads which are attached to the tapestries. A cycle of destruction and rebuilding, imitating the process of dancing: wearing down the body, to take worries and frustrations out and to find or rebuild oneself. The broken glass creates poetic conceptual threads of light between the shards of glass on the floor and pieces of mirror in the disco balls, leaving the moving bodies between to be seen in glimpses and glimmers in the reflecting and refracting light, constantly shifting appearance as they move between these threads. 

As a trans non-binary body, I cannot help but take these two ongoing bodies of work -both documenting the space of a dance floor or nightclub- and see the possibility of the void they offer between. A void I grapple with while in these nightlife spaces. A void that can offer the exploration of the body, how a body wants to move, present, and engage with other bodies. It is a void that offers constant flux. As Shaun J Wright states in Up In The Club ‘I Was Born a Queen. I’ve Always Been A Queen’ an interview with Madison Moore, “nightlife is a space where identities are created, tested, questioned, confirmed, and rehearsed…” [3] continuing that “Nightclubs are portals to another dimension. They are not necessarily safe spaces, nor are they utopian by nature, but they do offer a vision of life on the other side.” [4]

It is this possibility, the potential of something changing or shifting that is exciting. The void Andres creates does not define expectation, but instead offers a space to experiment and explore as a/the body/ies that exist between the celestial and terrestrial of the dance floor and disco ball. It offers a possible answer to the question Renate Lorenz asks in Queer Art: A Freak Theory, “how can queer art be taken up in a way that does not classify, level and understand, but continues, by other means, the denormalization that it incites, the desire for being-other, being-elsewhere, and change?” [5] The space created by the celestial and terrestrial opens a place for radical queer politics. Lorenz writes that:

“A radical queer politics requires us not only to propose images and living strategies for alternative sexualities and genders, but also to promote all kinds of economic, political, epistemological, and cultural experiments that seek to produce difference and equanimity at the same time” [6]

A dance space when thought of as a void has a possibility for this potential equanimity; it does not require exclusiveness or specific requirement. Admittedly these elitist dance floors do exist, but through the focus of the floor and disco ball the specificity of place becomes abstracted. Leaving us to wonder, project and fantasize. The void of the dance floor, between the celestial and terrestrial becomes Muñoz’s possible horizon. A place for mixing and possible contagion. A spreading of release, joy and pleasure. As Lorenz states, “unlike representation and reception, the mode of contagion seeks to entangle the viewer as a participant in denormalizing practices.” [7] The dancers here become the participants, held and facilitated by the work of Andres Payan Estrada. This, for me, is what Andres’s work is; the work functions as tools. Tools that animate our imaginations and dreams of how we want to exist in space. A way to host a void that requires a/the body/ies to complete the work. To connect the celestial and terrestrial. 

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[1] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009), 1.
[2]  Michael Stevens, What If the Moon Was a Disco Ball?, YouTube (YouTube, 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8I25H3bnNw.
[3]  Shaun J Wright, “Up In The Club ‘I Was Born a Queen . I’ve Always Been A Queen’: A Conversation With Shaun J. Wright,” essay, in Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric, ed. Madison Moore (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 111–155, 128.
[4] Ibid, 123.
[5]  Renate Lorenz, Queer Art: A Freak Theory (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012), 17.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.

Bibliography

Lorenz, Renate. Queer Art: A Freak Theory. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012. 

Muñoz, José  Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009. 

Stevens, Michael. What if the Moon was a Disco Ball? YouTube. YouTube, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8I25H3bnNw. 

Wright, Shaun J. “Up In The Club ‘I Was Born a Queen. I’ve Always Been A Queen’: A Conversation With Shaun J. Wright.” Essay. In Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric, edited by Madison Moore, 111–155. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 

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Bio: matt lambert is a non-binary, trans, multidisciplinary collaborator and co-conspirator working towards equity, inclusion, and reparation. lambert is interested in the relationship of body, object and place and the movements or constellations that form between these points. It is in the inhabited of these queer [and/or] liminal spaces that these interactions gain their strength as a force that is yet to be fully explored for its potential as a terroristic act to westernized and colonial institutions. lambert collaborates with multi-media artists of a vast array of disciplines to reconfigure the current cultural systems of queerness and body politics while challenging the boundaries of craft. By unpacking the witnessing of toxic intimacies and the embedded systems of oppression rooted into the geological strata of culture and land, lambert is interested in ways to disrupt and subvert these mechanisms through a chimerical practice of making, collaborating, writing and curating to create systems for platform building and methodologies to talk with and not at in regards to the othered body. matt also guest edited ‘Issue Fifteen: Tools, Use, Mastery‘ for Decorating Dissidence.

Header image: Documented Eagle LA disco ball