Xandra Ibarra

Xandra Ibarra
Born	July 9 El Paso/ Juarez border
Nationality	Mexican American
Occupation	Performance Artist
Website	http://www.xandraibarra.com

Xandra Ibarra (born July 9), who sometimes works under the alias of "La Chica Boom", is a queer, Chicana performance artist based in Oakland, California. Artforum recognized Ibarra’s performance Nude Laughing as best in performance in 2016.

Art and Performance

Spictacles

Ibarra performed “spictacles” under the moniker of La Chica Boom from 2002 - 2012. Spictacles, a term coined by Ibarra, "mixed and repurposed traditional Mexican iconography alongside racist tropes within the erotic and sensual vocabulary of burlesque. One example of such a performance is La Tortillera, exhibited in 2004. "The performance consists of Ibarra in “traditional” colorful Mexican tortillera garb. Although she singles out the Mexican housewife, this is also the attire that high end or “authentic” Mexican restaurants require of women who stand in panoptical view of their costumers, assuring the tortilla’s faux homemade authenticity. As the performance progresses, Ibarra sheds more and more items of clothing, in the tradition of burlesque, until she dons nothing but her pasties and a Tapatío bottle attached to a strap-on, which she then uses to cum on the tortilla before consuming it."

Nude Laughing

Xandra Ibarra performed Nude Laughing at the Eli Broad Museum in Los Angeles in 2016, where she walked nude throughout the museum, dragging a nylon sac with paradigmatic “white lady accoutrements” . Through this performance, Ibarra uses nudity to explore the "vexed relation racialized subjects have to not only one’s own skin, but also one’s own entanglements and knots (skeins) with whiteness and white womanhood." The piece is inspired from John Currin's 1998 painting titled "Laughing Nude," which features a nude white woman with her face caught in the middle of maniacal laughter that blurs the erotic with the grotesque. In an email to The Huffington Post, Ibarra explains, "I want to capture what I can of these white nudes in my brown figure and skin and enact a union between sound and gesture that can't be captured within a painting." She aims to bring the nudes to life in what she describes as the "wrong" body, enhancing the grotesque, tactile, and expressive dimensions of how she imagines white womanhood.

Untitled Fucking (A Collaboration)

The 2013 video, Untitled Fucking, is a collaborative performance work by artists Xandra Ibarra and Amber Hawk Swanson that stages a queer intercourse between sex acts and speech acts. Rodriguez examines the video to argue that "feminism also needs to be about imagining a sexual politics that does not require the abandonment of fun and pleasure." She goes on to state that "It is precisely because our sexual realities are so often steeped in abjection and violence that insisting on depictions of sex that represent the viscous substances of our lives becomes so urgent."

Spic Ecdysis

An ongoing photo series from 2014-2015, captures Ibarra’s symbolic process of shedding the skin of a cockroach. The term ecdysis means to shed, moult, it comes from Ancient Greek: ἐκδύω (ekduo), “to take off, strip off.” By comparing herself to a cockroach and the biological process of ecdysis, she "dwells within the limits given—showing the false promise of sheer transformation." She says in her explanation, "Even when I attempt to reassemble new skin, sick of my spic casings, I remain destined to be crucified through them."

Activism

Ibarra is a community organizer, working within immigrant rights, anti-rape, and prison abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has actively participated in organizing with INCITE!, a national feminist of color organization dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of interpersonal and state violence.

Significance

Venues and Exhibits

Xandra Ibarra's performance work has been featured internationally in a wide range of venues, including, the Eli Broad Museum, the De Young Museum, Anderson Collection, Maccarone Inc Art Gallery, The Stud (bar), Asian Art Museum, El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Popa Gallery (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Joe's Pub, PPOW Gallery (NYC), and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Grants and Awards

Among her numerous awards are the Art Matters Grant, National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Award, the Fund for the Arts, ReGen Artist Fund and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award.

Features in Academic Publications

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings

Juana María Rodríguez, is a professor of Performance Studies and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about Xandra Ibarra’s performance and the erotics of the U.S./ Mexican border. In the performance, a border patrol agent violates La Chica Boom while stripping off her clothes. Rodriguez examines Ibarra’s performance to "to make sense of our most politically incorrect sexual fantasies."

Spic(y) Appropriations: The Gustatory Aesthetics of Xandra Ibarra (aka La Chica Boom)

Ivan Ramos, an academic with a Ph.D. in Performance Studies, from University of California, Berkeley writes about La Chica Boom’s performances ‘ Tortillera and Untitled Fucking. He discusses Ibarra’s incorporation of the symbolic Tapatio bottle across many of her performances. Ramos discusses how this calls attention to the history of denigration of Mexicans, carried out through the harsh criticisms of the spiciness of Mexican cuisine. Ramos writes about the ways La Chica Boom appropriates and plays with the stereotypes of Mexicans as unsanitary, obnoxiously flavorful, and over sexualized, in order to dismantle them. The author mentions how this work is similar to the Chicana/o art collective founded in the 1960s, ASCO,.

Press

Xandra Ibarra has been featured in many newspapers and magazines, most notably, Artforum, Art Practical, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, San Francisco Bay Guardian and SF Weekly.