Sell Out, A Series: 5 Questions with Kevin Jesuino
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Sell Out is a series by interdisciplinary artist Angela Fama (she/they), who co-creates conversations with individual artists across Vancouver. Questioning ideas of artistry, identity, “day jobs,” and how they intertwine, Fama settles in with each artist (at a local café of their choice) and asks the same series of questions. With one roll of medium format film, Fama captures portraits of the artist after their conversations.
Kevin Jesuino (queer, he/him they/them, Portuguese) is an interdisciplinary artist. Follow him on Instagram @kevinjesuino, or visit www.kevinjesuino.com.
Location: Vancouver Art Gallery
What do you make/create?
I think, when it comes down to it, what I create is space for the unseen, space for complexity, and for people to come together under that complexity. What that looks like is perhaps performance, or activism, sometimes that also goes into media arts. Ultimately, what I am trying to uncover is an embodied experience related to site–site could be an environment or it could be the body–and to sit in relationship between something, between people. That is what it comes down to. That looks like multiple things: like working with teenagers in Alberta, developing a campaign around why gay/straight alliances are important in schools, inviting men to slow dance with me in concrete urban spaces, or inviting people to cook with me while we tell each other stories about our roots. It’s always this simple act, that maybe harkens back to something in the post-modern dance world, that is always layered with some sort of revealing of the unseen.
What do you do to support that?
Support looks like a lot of things. For me, I need to start with myself. That usually relies on a daily body practice that I cultivate. That involves a lot of deep listening to my body; a lot of working with language and the body to find narrative and metaphor, when I’m stretching, when I’m strengthening. When I exhale, I breathe out into community, and find relation with people and the non-human, breathing and non-breathing things. That’s how I cultivate that daily support for myself.
Describe something about how your art practice and your “day job” interact.
I live in Vancouver, so I have to have multiple jobs. I’ve come to a point in my life where I recognise that my art practice is not separate from where I make my money. Even though I gather income from different streams, my social, relational, and embodied practices are tied and bound up in all that work too. In some ways it’s always bleeding in and out, through and around capitalism and where my money is coming from.
My “job” is in doing things like front-of-house management at different theatre venues, working with audiences and inviting and creating access to the arts in that regard. I also teach, whether that’s in a lecture format or in a movement-based format. All of this is relational. I see teaching as a way to relate with students, to work with having them relate with larger ideas and concepts and then put those into their bodies and have them go out and experiment with stuff. That’s where the money comes in, but the idea of “work” is also me sitting on the bus and choosing to sit there and breathe, and choosing to either be present with all of the bus or run away into my phone. Not to say that running into my phone doesn’t give me something relational, but my “work” is an embodied understanding, to be conscious about how those relationship threads are being built intentionally.
What’s a challenge you’re facing, or have faced, in relation to this and/or what’s a benefit?
The struggle I’m having right now in my 40's is: How do I decouple my “work” from my “job”? Throughout my 20’s and my 30’s, I assumed that “professional artist” meant that I was getting all my income from that, and that my “job” created my identity for me. Now I recognise that “work” and “job” can be two different things. Alot of people leave the arts probably because they can’t decouple “work” and “job,” and over time, the sense of security in their “job” erodes them, and they abandon ship on being creative. Now that I’ve gone through decades of being an artist, and perhaps because I’ve achieved a certain level of education and I’ve also committed to a practice, I can die happy knowing I’ve given my life to being an artist. I won’t let that part of me just dwindle. But it takes a certain level of perseverance and protecting my creative practice, regardless of where my income comes from. The oppressive factors of capitalism, productivity, and security that are founded in hetero-patriarchial white supremacist ideals – all of that stops all creativity in someone if they don’t persist and resist that demand and oppression. Those factors and ideals don’t allow anyone to just flourish and thrive. I guess it’s a call and a reminder that one’s “work” and “job” don’t have to be the same and that a commitment to a daily practice, regardless of getting an income or not, “pays out” over time.
Where the challenge lies is often in getting validation as an artist, I believe that a lot of the work you do as an artist is never going to be seen. Even if others do see something, some final product, two percent of the process it takes is seen by the public, a curator, or producer. So, we go on in our lives generating more effort to only then showcase this small little bit. And so, my challenge is: How do you get people that are in positions of power to recognise that?
My work may never be presented in a traditional theatre or a traditional gallery. My work belongs in the street, in the hands of the public. Maybe I call upon the spirit of Diego Rivera, in that I am here to really stand up for the fact that art is what keeps culture and people glued together, bound together, and frankly, maybe the reason why we are so disconnected is because we keep not prioritising the arts. I would challenge artists that it’s not about going into these white galleries or black boxes to put your art in these neutral spaces; those art practices are actually not conducive to the importance of art. Art actually belongs in the cobblestones, in the sidewalks, and not just on marketing or in exclusive spaces. [Chuckles], I’ll get off my soapbox now.
This realisation has allowed me to ease myself, to really listen to my body. I’m getting better at resisting when I feel like I’m being formed into something that society wants from me, or what an individual wants from me, and I’m more assertive with saying: “That’s just not me.” Being in relationship with everything is not just something that I’m coming up with here, or what academics have come up with, this is like: “Decolonial Indigenous Knowledge 101.” If you want to get philosophical, you can go back to Descartes and critique “The Subjective/Objective” but no, we’re actually always in relationship with everything. Always. Living and nonliving. I walk through life really trying to recognise that my art practice is not something where I just go: “Ok, now I’m going into my art practice.” It’s a constant. A constant thing that I have to cultivate with every human, or object, or natural element in our world, on a daily minute-to-minute basis.
So, how do you move through life with that foundational understanding and consider every moment a moment to re-relate? In a day and age when we do see extremism, I’m compelled to figure out a way to relate. How do I reconnect with people without feeling like myself, or the community I stand with, or ally with, are not going to be hurt? To respond from a place of care and humanity, rather than fear, even though I might not agree with someone on certain things. I certainly say this from a place of privilege, but I also recognise the traumas in my own body shape how I respond. And so, what’s the practice? How do we reconnect also when we have become algorithmised by the machine and the social media dilemma? It’s tough, and it’s hard. I’ll reference Ian Williams recent CBC Massey Lectures around this idea of how to have conversations and to reconnect with people.
Have you made, or created, anything that was inspired by something from your day job? Please describe.
My most recent project, Tender City: The Silent Slow Dance Project, is what’s sitting in my body the most right now.
Tender City: The Silent Slow Dance Project invited men to slow dance with each other in urban spaces. At face value, it’s a queer project if what you see is two men slow dancing. Under all that, there’s also the question of: Why can’t male tenderness exist everywhere? And under that is: What systems are at play? White supremacy. Heterosexuality. Capitalism. Patriarchy. Systems that keep us bound to ways of relating with each other that don’t allow other ways of knowing, that also apply to relationalities other than two men. This project is inspired by my “job,” in that these systems mean I’m slogging everyday so that I can pay my rent, selling myself in ways that aren’t authentic to me in order to live and survive. What would it mean to prioritise happiness for the public and the people, instead of prioritising GDP (gross domestic product)? Instead of having to work day in and day out to pay for what should be a right–housing and access to food–to actually put that care into humans and the earth. The simple act of two men being intimate speaks volumes to all of that; it’s a disruption that critiques why we keep doing the same patterns over and over again.
Hopefully with this project, there are two things happening. One is the encounter of seeing two men, which becomes a sort of intervention, a moment that onlookers get to experience, that shifts something they don’t normally see. Then, the second thing happening, for the two men that are slow dancing together, there’s something somatically happening on a body level that’s allowing them to soften in the face of fear. To feel mutual support, care for one another. There’s a sense of undoing trauma, undoing that fear. This is an invitation for anyone that’s reading this, but predominantly for anyone masculine/male identifying, to ask: In today’s world, what does it mean to show that tenderness? An invitation to soften in the face of fear.
Where I chose to meet you is today known as šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl'e7énḵ Square. A word in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ (Halkomelem) and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) language meaning ‘a place of cultural gathering,’ which refers to the former Vancouver Law Courts and now part of the Vancouver Art Gallery North Plaza. It’s really important that we contextualise that the photographs that you and I are taking are on the site where we enacted Tender City: The Silent Slow Dance Project. Surrounding the plaza are the sites of three former, and some still existing, hotels. You have the Hotel Vancouver, which is the Fairmont Hotel now. You have the Georgia Hotel, which is still there, and then, where the Royal Bank of Canada currently is, there used to be a hotel called The Dorchester. In the past, those three hotels had either men’s salons, men’s bars and/or men’s hot steam baths in their basements. Those spaces were gendered. We now know, of course, where there’s sites of homosociality there’s a high increase of homosexual activity and cruising. There’s this point of tension in this paradox, where you have these three spaces where homosexual activity was discreetly happening and would spill out on the streets directly across the street from where they were being incarcerated. It was here, with thirty men this past summer, in August of 2024, where we called in the queer ancestors that were incarcerated and we slow-danced in their memory.
Angela Fama (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, creator of the Death Conversation Game, photographer, and musician. They are a French/Italian/Scottish/Irish/Unknown settler with unclear lineage currently existing on the unceded traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations.
Follow them at IG @angelafama IG @deathconversationgame or on their website www.angelafama.com
