Alexandro Segade

ALEXANDRO SEGADE
An Artist’s Statement

For over three decades, my artistic collaborations have reimagined group identities across differences. I was raised in San Diego by a Cuban-Puerto Rican Chicano Studies professor and a LA-born, Jewish high school history teacher. Code-switching was my childhood norm; my parents’ families spoke different languages. As a latchkey kid, I developed a deep identification with MTV, and “found” myself in comic shops, playing D&D, and doing school plays. Coming out in the early 1990s, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, under the spell of New Queer Cinema, meant radically redefining family, and identity, as a constellation of affinities. I met Malik Gaines in college, becoming partners and collaborators; together, we fostered a DIY scene of fellow art kids. In 2000, we formed My Barbarian with Jade Gordon, synthesizing our pop, theatrical, musical, avant-garde influences into our brand of performance art. The group’s name recognizes the "outsider" as a position anyone can occupy.

In 2021, My Barbarian’s 20-year survey exhibition was curated by Adrienne Edwards at the Whitney Museum of American Art and ICA LA. Its theatrical staging was an interdisciplinary transgression within the white cube, a three-channel video installation synched to a light show spotlighting costumes, masks, and puppets. The catalog, co-edited by the curator and My Barbarian, traces our practice across three chapters. First, "Showcore" describes queer cabaret projects like Pagan Rights (2004), performed as a hippie commune art band resisting the right-wing "war on terror.” Second, "Site-Responsive Spectacles" critically engaged identity and place. In Gods of Canada (2005), Canadian superheroes ride sailboats on Lake Ontario to celebrate socialized medicine on Canada Day. This model shifted to institutional critique in Double Agency (2015), the museum backdrop becoming our subject. We forged masks from LACMA's collection to act out a heist. In a reversal of the logic of the encyclopedic collection, this work was later acquired by the museum.

The final chapter, "Post-Political Theater," turned to social practice and pedagogy. For the 2014 Whitney Biennial, we adapted Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother (1932) into a class-consciousness raising. Our methodology for participatory political performance was codified in Post-Living Ante-Action Theater. PoLAAT culminated in a 2016 exhibition at the New Museum, combining a didactic installation with co-created performances by international collaborators. Work drawn from this period foresaw how community-building and activism would become central to contemporary performance, and continues to be included in group shows and scholarship on the so-called educational turn in conceptual performance art.

In the mid-2000s, I went back to UCLA for an MFA to explore my voice outside my usual collaborations. My first projects post-MFA were set in the queer dystopia of Clonifornia (2010-2017). Inspired by Malik’s and my 2009 marriage, these performances conflated the debate over gay marriage with fears over artificial intelligence, surveillance, and gay oligarch Peter Thiel. A DIY Bladerunner, I projected hand-drawn animation over actors in interconnected sci-fi performances, building to Future St., which depicts a homo-fascist clone police state in conflict with queer mutant separatists. The piece traveled from the Fisher Center at Bard College to the Broad in LA; the script was published by Yale Theater Journal; it reads as a personal reflection on a gay relationship in a world where privacy is provisional.

I continued this investigation into the politics of science fiction and fantasy through critical writing. My essays on superhero comics have appeared in scholarly publications, exhibition catalogs, and art magazines. I write about comics as a discursive site with resonance in political theory and contemporary art, offering close reads of X-Men, Spider-Man, and fanzines. These explorations informed my own comics series, with episodes published in Artforum, and my graphic novel, The Context, published in 2020 by Primary Information, which explored the superhero team as a queer parable of belonging.

My hybrid approach to science fiction draws on my experience assembling an identity from scraps left by others to create a speculative space where I can imagine the possible. This tactic led me to the libretto for Star Choir (2023), written for multiple voices and points of view, from human “pioneers” on an exoplanet to its multi-species organism. Writing Star Choir included a deep dive into critical theory and speculative fiction, linking debates over anti-blackness and post-colonial theory to post-humanism. Malik composed a choral score, and we presented the piece in iterations, ending with a full production by The Industry at Mt. Wilson Observatory, where Hubble theorized the expanding universe. Tools we developed in My Barbarian are evident in Star Choir at an epic scale. As we co-directed performances by trained singers and musicians, I directed a crew filming the piece, which was edited into a film that premiered at the Hammer Museum and MoMA.

Shortly thereafter, I premiered Anoche (Last Night, 2024) at the 15th Havana Biennial, marking an engagement with my family's migratory history and the first time I created work entirely in Spanish. Co-presented by the Performance Art Museum in LA (where I now serve as Chair of the Board), I conceived this performance as a night in an imaginary cabaret in Old Havana, my grandfather's birthplace. A melancholy vaudeville co-created by contemporary Cuban performers, the resulting 28-minute essay film debuted on site at La Carpínteria, Havana, followed by a video installation at Beta Local, San Juan, Puerto Rico, near my grandmother's birthplace. Innovating a space between performance and media across the diaspora, I continue collaborating with artists in San Juan and Havana, disseminating work that travels even when the artists themselves cannot.

This intervention into historical legacies of colonialism includes a song adapting letters from Che Guevara to Fidel Castro into a bolero composed by Malik Gaines. Together, we have been an influential duo, mentoring and supporting artistic communities in big cities and small, collaborating on works that challenge boundaries and take them as our subject.

Currently, I am working on a few overlapping projects. Malik Gaines and I are developing Moon Mine, about the very real plans for lunar development being made by corporate interests, into a full length multi-media project. I am writing an experimental biopic screenplay for My Barbarian about the career of Rose Bird. I am continuing to develop My Barbarian’s Tarot deck, hard at work on two more minor arcana now, one for Birds and one for Amphibians. And… I am making (and writing about) more comics and comics-inspired graphic work.

Also, I am an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at UC San Diego.