Spanning over twenty-five years of uncompromising artistic inquiry, Pleas of Resistance at MACBA, Barcelona, traces the trajectory of Carlos Motta’s practice, an oeuvre rooted in the body, sexual dissidence, and the politics of care. From early photographic self-portraits to recent performances and video installations, Motta interrogates the violence and silences of the archive, while challenging Eurocentric epistemologies and the enduring colonial legacy of religion. In this conversation with Arnold Braho, the artist reflects on the movements and medium that shaped his vision and his work.
Arnold Braho: I'd like to begin with an epistemological question, which I believe is explored deeply in the large video installation Nefandus (2013) in the exhibition's first room. Nefandus—meaning “that which must not be spoken”—evokes censorship, symbolic violence, and prohibition. In the video, a canoe journey along the conquered Don Diego River reveals nature—water, earth—not as a passive backdrop, but as a living archive of silenced histories and colonial domination.
The installation, made me think of Malcom Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (Polity Books), where he reflects on how territories carry the traces of colonization and resistance, and how they cannot be thought of as separate from historical violence, regardless of the continuous attempt of modernity to delink one from the other. This, coming back to epistemology, re-produces a fractured and fracturing knowledge.
How does your work attempt to weave together nature, memory, and sexuality, resisting the separations imposed by colonial modernity?
Carlos Motta: That is a very thoughtful question, and it touches directly on many of the issues I sought to explore with this work. I wanted to think about the conquest and colonization not only as a problem of lands and territories—and, of course, people—but also as an imposition of knowledge(s).
While the conquest of the Americas has often been studied through the lens of land dispossession and the displacement of Indigenous peoples, it is equally important to recognize that colonial domination also imposed and created entirely different ways of thinking. One aspect I wanted to consider was how gender and sexuality were forcibly (re)defined, replacing plural Indigenous understandings with rigid colonial frameworks. From today’s perspective, this might seem self-evident, but it is crucial to remember that the colonial project fundamentally reshaped the very ways people understood the body, desire, and the self.
What remains, after the destruction of Indigenous cultures, is not just absences, but the ongoing presence of the project of subjugation. We still have objects that represent fragments of these erased worlds. For this exhibition, I also focused on the concept of the “homoerotic artifact”—objects that I saw in books, catalogs, and museum collections throughout my life, yet [which] were always presented in a disconnected manner, stripped of their contexts and narratives. Their presentation often relied on archaeological or anthropological constructs that, intentionally or not, imposed colonial viewpoints, reinforcing the very power structures that erased these histories in the first place.
I wanted to propose a way of understanding history that starts from this recognition: we cannot think about Indigenous knowledges without first acknowledging that the ground we stand on was, and continues to be, fractured. We lack the context, language, and epistemological frameworks to fully understand these objects through Indigenous lenses, because these knowledges were erased. What we have instead are fragments—objects that, from today’s perspective, might seem to suggest scenes of homoeroticism, homosociality, or homosexuality. But these are inadequate categories, as we simply do not have the tools to grasp how pleasure, the body, and desire were conceived and performed by Indigenous pre-Hispanic groups.
For me, the project, including the Nefandus Trilogy (2013) and Towards a Homoerotic Historiography (2013- 2014)—the two connected works in the first room of my exhibition at MACBA—is less about tracing the origins of homosexuality within Indigenous cultures and more about exposing the structures that have defined what knowledge is and how it has been imposed.
In the three films, this takes the form of narrative structures, using voiceover and site-specific imagery to tell stories. In the physical installation, it manifests through museological strategies. The museum itself—the dark blue walls, the small windows, the use of glass and backlighting—becomes part of the work, highlighting how institutions, by their very architecture and presentational methods, construct certain knowledges as legitimate while obscuring others.
Regarding the landscape, the film proposes the idea that nature itself is complicit: nature has witnessed and allowed these atrocities to take place. Nature serves as the backdrop and the setting.
In Nefandus, this idea is extended. The river becomes a vehicle that erases the traces of violence, washing away the physical evidence of what happened. The film seeks to go back and search for any remaining index of the past, recognizing that nature’s cyclical rhythms have a way of obscuring history and making it disappear over time.
This line of thought also ties into the broader concept of nature, which has often been invoked as a pre-established moral order to justify certain gender and sexual norms. Of course, we now understand that sexuality and gender are not fixed biological facts but products of historical, cultural, and political constructions, shaped by medical, legal, and religious discourses and [are] imposed by institutions as forms of control and coloniality.
AB: At this point, I think it’s worth continuing with the concept of “nature”—as complex as it is useful—and which has long been used in modern colonial knowledge frameworks to justify and impose a pre-established moral order of gender and sexuality.
In your work, you reclaim marginalized figures, reject institutionalized sexual categories, and question the normative frameworks that dictate what can be said, shown, or lived. I’m thinking, for instance, of the recurring image of the demon—incarnation of what modernity has labeled “perverse,” “deviant,” “unnamable”—which, in your work, returns as a figure of disobedience, of rewriting, of nonconforming desire.
How does your work contribute to deconstructing the idea of sexuality as a “natural fact”? And what artistic tools allow you to bring to light desires, histories, and forms of life that have been erased from dominant narratives?
CM: In the context of the exhibition, the answer to your question unfolds in one of the curatorial chapters, Deviant Bodies. This dark room, containing three videos and several sculptures, explores the relationship between religion as a structuring force and the construction of identity categories with moral and legal repercussions.
The project examines how the Catholic Church and its canonical literature have historically defined certain bodies as “different,” often transforming these distinctions into punishable categories. This process, deeply intertwined with the development of legal systems, has enabled the Church to establish moral norms and impose them through law. For instance, when the Church declares heterosexuality and biological reproduction as divinely mandated, any deviation from this standard, like a non-reproductive sex—becomes a transgression against both divine law and the moral order.
One key reference in this section is Corpo Fechado—The Devil's Work (2018). This work draws from a text by Saint Peter Damian, an 11th-century Italian priest known for his self-flagellation and extreme penitence. In his “Letter 31,” Damian articulated the identity category of the “sodomite” for the first time, defining sodomy as an anti-reproductive act, a sin against nature that warranted punishment. This was a critical moment because it established a linguistic and moral structure that the Church used to identify, condemn, and control non-reproductive sexual behaviors.
Damian’s letter, sent to the Pope, effectively created a new category of deviance, providing the Church with a powerful framework to regulate sexuality. This act of naming was not merely descriptive but prescriptive, shaping centuries of moral and legal thought.
The film Corpo Fechado also incorporates a colonial case from the archives in Lisbon, telling the story of José Francisco Pereira, a man sold into slavery in Brazil from West Africa. Pereira combined elements of West African spirituality with Catholic practices, creating a syncretic form of resistance. He crafted bolsa de mandinga—amulets to protect fellow enslaved people from harm.
When the colonial authorities discovered these amulets, Pereira was arrested and tried as a sorcerer. During his trial, he confessed to being a sorcerer, claiming to have had sex with the devil in the body of a white man. This confession not only reinforced the racial and spiritual anxieties of the Inquisition, but also cast Pereira as both a sorcerer and a sodomite, merging moral and legal violations to justify his persecution.
I found this case particularly striking because it demonstrates how these identity categories, created by institutions like the Church, have persisted through time and continue to shape our understanding of identity today. Figures like the “sodomite,” the “hermaphrodite,” or the “monstrous woman” in my work are not just historical artifacts, but embodiments of this long history of categorization and control. They reveal how religious, legal, and philosophical institutions have worked together to sustain these ideas of otherness.
For example, Catholic imagery often relies on monstrous figures to represent hell or purgatory. These figures are frequently feminized, sexually ambiguous, or otherwise threatening to the established order. By presenting them in my work, I aim to expose the deep connections between the construction of identity and the maintenance of power.
AB: I’d like to turn to the question of the archive, which has become central again in many artistic and political practices—especially in queer and decolonial contexts. No longer a neutral or institutional space, the archive becomes a counter-device, a form of collective and affective writing built through fracture, omission, relation, and pain.
In Legacy (2019), this tension becomes explicit: you attempt to pronounce, without pause, all the known moments in the history of HIV and AIDS, wearing a dental device that prevents you from speaking clearly.
Like the actions of the movement ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the archive becomes embodied, not external to the body.
What memories are stored when the archive passes through the body?
CM: I appreciate the idea of approaching the archive in search of bodies, as one of the things I discovered when researching colonial history is how the archive itself acts as a device for creating and fixing historical categories.
For example, the figures of José Francisco Pereira in Corpo Fechado–The Devil's Work and Martina Parra in Deseos (2015) come from real criminal cases found in colonial archives. Parra’s story is preserved in the National Archives of Colombia in Bogotá. What struck me is how the archive captures and contains lives, reducing complex, messy existences to fixed, simplified narratives. If someone like Martina Parra had evaded the archive, their story might have escaped the chains of history itself. But because her actions were documented and filed, her body is now an “object” of history, reduced to a fragment within institutional memory.
In this sense, the archive is a powerful legitimizing institution. It turns lives into manageable pieces of data, reinforcing ideological structures. These documents, once stored in dusty cabinets and now often in digital files, are accessible only through bureaucratic processes, sometimes even requiring payment for access. This gives the archive a certain authoritative power. It becomes a place where “important” and “truthful” things reside, even as it flattens and simplifies the lives it captures.
In the context of sexuality and gender, this is particularly significant. The archive has often been used to construct narratives of deviance, marginalization, and criminality. It might, for instance, label someone a “bad person” or criminalize them for defying religious or legal norms, challenging medical authorities, or breaking with social conventions. These fragments, when collected, create a simplified, linear version of a person's life, erasing the complexity of their existence.
However, I am also interested in the possibility of rethinking the role of the archive in the present, to challenge and rewrite these established narratives. In Legacy, for example, I engage with the mainstream narrative around the history of HIV/AIDS.
HIV/AIDS is one of the most stigmatized diseases in modern history, often linked to the same marginalized figures I have been exploring—people who defy the norms of the Church, the legal system, or broader social conventions. This is reflected in the infamous "Four Hs" used in early medical discourses about AIDS: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users, and Haitians—categories that neatly encapsulate the intersection of fear, prejudice, and institutional control.
For Legacy, I collaborated with Ted Kerr, a historian of HIV/AIDS and curator, to create a “counter-document” that pushes the timeline of the virus back to 1903, challenging the commonly accepted narrative that places its origins around 1981, with the so-called “Patient Zero.”
In the video, I invited Ari Shapiro, a well-known NPR journalist, to read this revised timeline to me. I wore a dental gag, forcing my mouth open, and attempted to repeat what he said. This gesture became a metaphor for the difficulty of remembering, repeating, and embodying these complex histories. The physical discomfort, the pain, and the inevitable failure to accurately reproduce what I had just heard became a way of illustrating the inadequacy of historical memory. It highlights the gap between the official, authoritative voice of history and the lived, embodied experience of those it attempts to capture.
In this way, the archive is both a site of control and a potential site of resistance—a place where bodies have been trapped, but also where new forms of memory and counter-history can emerge.
AB: Watching the video installation We Who Feel Differently (2012), I had the impression that the project functions as a device that holds together two fundamental forces: on one side, the archive — collecting sixty voices and decades of queer activism; on the other, a permanent assembly, where these voices don’t resolve into a unified community, but remain in tension, multiplying and contradicting one another.
Similarly, in your work there is no given community—only a plurality of queer subjectivities building, through situated, unstable, and affective processes, a “we” that remains in flux.
What form does this “we” take for you today? And how do you think about the relationship between archive and assembly, between memory and political activation?
CM: That’s a great question. The title We Who Feel Differently is both strategic and deeply significant. It speaks to the idea of collectivity, which is central to social movements but [which is] particularly complex within sexual and gender politics. The title is borrowed from a 1950s Norwegian writer who sought to articulate a sense of belonging among gay people at a time when such identities were heavily stigmatized. It captures the desire to form a collective identity without erasing the differences that make this “we” powerful and complex.
Social movements often form around a shared “we”—a collective identity that unites people with common goals. However, the LGBTQIA+2SS spectrum is far from homogeneous. It encompasses a wide range of identities, each with distinct experiences, needs, and histories. Even the acronym itself reflects this plurality yet struggles to capture the full breadth of self-definitions. This tension is evident today, as some within the broader LGBTQIA+ community seek to distance themselves from trans struggles, revealing ongoing debates over who belongs to this collective “we” and on what terms.
When I began this project around 2012-2013, I was interested in how sexual and gender politics have shifted, from the radical activism of the 70s and 80s to the more assimilationist movements of the 2000s. In the U.S. and Europe, the major political focus during this period was marriage equality, which marked a shift from earlier, more radical critiques of heteronormativity and patriarchy. This raised a critical question: What is lost when a movement for transformation becomes a struggle for assimilation?
We Who Feel Differently aims to capture voices that argue for difference rather than mere “inclusion”—those who seek to create new forms of belonging, rather than simply to gain access to existing ones. As we’ve seen, rights won through decades of struggle are now being rolled back in many parts of the world, making it more critical than ever to resist pressures to assimilate and instead to embrace difference as a political force.
In this sense, the title is both a statement of identity and a call to action—a reminder that our differences can be a source of strength, not a weakness to be erased.
AB: Thank you.