La Chola Poblete, artist, tells the world: “Argentina is neither white nor heterosexual”
La Chola Poblete is becoming an iconic visual artist worldwide. Her work fuses indigenous culture, queer brown identity, pop culture, and transvestite fury. We interviewed her in her studio in San Telmo.
Share
Chola Poblete 's first encounter with art was thanks to a dwarf. She was five years old and was leafing through an illustrated encyclopedia in her grandmother's house, in a poor neighborhood of Guaymallén, Mendoza, where she lived with her mother. She pointed to the image, and her mother replied: it's a painting. That's how she learned about the existence of this possibility called painting. "It stayed with me because instead of telling me, 'He 's a dwarf ,' she said 's a painting ,' at a time when I didn't know paintings existed, or art, or museums or galleries. My mother was a domestic worker; she worked all day. At school, they didn't take us to museums either. But that day something opened up for me," she tells Presentes, while walking through her studio in downtown Buenos Aires, a large space covered with works in progress and an office.
Thirty-one years have passed since that first revelation, and today Chola Poblete is one of the Argentine visual artists with the greatest international reach . Long gone is the romanticism of the artist locked away in a small studio, in intimate contact with her work. The glass entrance door reads "Chola " in phosphorescent letters, as if it were a dressing room. She is preparing a large exhibition for November in Buenos Aires, and three other people are working in her studio. Nico and Manola help her paint, and Gonza handles the administrative tasks.
American Beauty: The Intersectional Bombshell
Since 2017, following her first exhibition at ARTEBA, everything accelerated. In that performance, "American Beauty ," she wore a traditional Andean costume and danced while her feet destroyed a mattress of Lays chips, the ancestral food turned into junk food. This is how the intersectional bomb that is Chola became known: indigenous culture, queer , class consciousness, and pop culture. Critics have labeled it Latin American post-neo-baroque or bastard post-neo-baroque and today it occupies a privileged place in the contemporary art market. With local representatives ranging from Egar Murillo (Jujuy, 1951- Mendoza, 2025) , a reference for Chola and several generations of artists, to the performer Tiziano Cruz (Jujuy, 1988) and the Mapuche visual artist Seba Calfuequeo (Santiago de Chile 1991) and universes where cultural hybridization and syncretism appear from the interdisciplinary.
Chola Poblete's work was built from a convergence of practices and media: performance, sculptures made of bread, acrylics, collage, fabrics, photography and watercolors - like the virgins that made her famous -, sacred images surrounded by profane iconography, whipalas, rock song lyrics, the Argentine coat of arms and other symbols that deconstruct any idea of identity as something stagnant.
From one queen to another, five centuries later
underground ended , and she embarked on a new life in Buenos Aires. “At first, I didn't want to have anything to do with Buenos Aires. I had a bad time. I didn't have a penny, no gallery would take me on. I did a show at the Cultural San Martín simply because they gave me money. It was the worst show I've ever done. No one came, I didn't invite anyone. It was in a horrible hallway,” she says.
During those years, she survived by doing a bit of everything—designing flyers, working at the La Boca Museum of Contemporary Art—and, paradoxically, it was during the pandemic that her career really took off. She received a call from the Pasto gallery , and in 2022, they brought her work to the Arco Fair in Madrid. “That's where it all began,” says La Chola. The turning point was Queen Letizia's visit to her stand: photographs and reports of that meeting went around the world. La Chola decided not to comply with the royal greeting protocol and told the queen, wearing a mask: “After 530 years, we meet again.”
“The Royal Household gives you a protocol for how you should communicate with the monarchs, and I wanted to do an action, a performance, but they wouldn't let me, and I didn't want to fall into cliché. Then I came up with this idea: it was the 530th anniversary of the Conquest. I felt like the queen of my stand. I said that phrase to her, and she stared at me. She asked me what pronoun I wanted to be called, and we walked around the stand. Pretty cool, really. The next day, my phone blew up, and I realized the impact it had had. At one point, we were on the subway with some friends, and a guy who must have been from Bolivia or Peru said to me, ' Chola, I love you .' Imagine, in Madrid. I couldn't believe it.”
It wasn't her first time visiting the Spanish capital, nor was it the first time a trip to Madrid changed her life. When she was 20, she came out while studying to become a teacher and pursue a degree in Visual Arts at the University of Mendoza, which led to a fight with her mother. She began experiencing anxiety attacks and depression, and left home. Some aunts who lived in Madrid invited her to stay with them for a while.
“I visited every museum I could. I wanted to see for myself what I had studied, and there I met the dwarf of my childhood. It was Velázquez's dwarf. That's when I went into even more of a crisis, because I felt that all that European art didn't represent me, neither me nor my culture. That European tradition in our painting didn't represent the true Argentina either. And I wanted to be in art books .” In the midst of that crisis, her character La Chola Poblete was born, an alter ego that, through transition, gradually became her identity.
Infiltrated between worlds
When asked about the place of identity in her life and work, La Chola doesn't give categorical answers because these are dimensions that have been mutually contaminating each other. The life events of Mauricio Poblete—a biographical character she continues to refer to in her work—led to the creation of La Chola, and in turn, La Chola increasingly occupied more space until it became her self. But, she says, dissociation increasingly prevails, and she wonders how much of a performance there is, precisely, in identity events.
Chola's universe is populated by influences that transcend the art world. Before learning technique and history in college, she grew up drawing models copied from gossip magazines, reading Rolling Stone, listening to Radio Aspen, and watching MTV. "I'm a product of the '90s," she says with a laugh, pointing to some Barbie dolls that now live in her studio. It was a cruel decade for those who didn't conform to a hegemony, and that aftertaste, a mixture of nostalgia and social critique, is very present in her work, which at times adopts melancholic tones, as seen in "Ejercicios del llanto," an introspective exhibition she created in 2024 for the Museo Moderno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires.
“Love for girls like me”
“I basically write what's happening to me. And sometimes when I feel like I'm too much into an intimate diary and don't want to show too much—because I might have already shown too much—I start writing lines from songs or quotes from other artists in interviews that I identify with.” These quotes express her concern about love (or heartbreak) and coexist alongside more political or social reflections. “I've never been in a relationship, and I'm eager to be, but love isn't easy for girls like me. Now I'm doing really well professionally. I feel like everything's in order. I've traveled all over the place. But when I come home after being surrounded by so many people, at events, at an exhibition, or even here at the workshop, I'd love to have a glass of wine with someone, to share with someone, and that doesn't exist. That's when I get an existential angst. The people I've met only love or desire you within four walls; they don't commit. Or you end up on apps with random people who don't understand my work or who I am. There's a very divided situation where I feel that in one place I'm valued a lot, and in the other, I'm nothing,” she says. It's in the realm of intimate relationships where she feels discrimination most for being trans. Because in the rest of everyday life, she says, racism prevails most, and she's felt that since she was a child.
“I was discriminated against more for my skin color than for being gay.”
“Especially in Mendoza, where there's a huge community of migrant workers and people who come from the north or from Peru and Bolivia to work in the wineries. And Mendoza is very secretive. There are many derogatory words or insults associated with that sector. Boliperuano, chola, garlic, onion, etc. In the clubs, I felt more discriminated against for my skin color than for being a faggot. But I managed to get in, made friends with the bouncers, talked to them until I tired them out, and they'd say, 'Come on in,'”
Chola was used to navigating multiple worlds, between different social classes and cultural backgrounds. Just like now. Her mother sent her to downtown schools, close to her jobs, so they could be there during recess. At those schools, her classmates were the children of professionals, a very different reality from that of her neighborhood. “I had a neighbor who didn't have a penny and walked barefoot. Then I'd go to one of my classmates' houses downtown with their cement houses, and we didn't even have a median wall. When it rained and everything flooded, my mom would put grocery bags over our shoes to leave the neighborhood and take the bus. I felt like the most ridiculous person in the world walking all those blocks, but when we got downtown, we took off the bags, looked spotless, and our shoes were all shiny. That's why I think life prepared me to tolerate a lot of uncomfortable situations and adapt, ” he responds when asked how he navigates the art world, which is also the world of money.
Fire and fury transvestite
“The Venice Biennale recognizes a queer artist for the first time,” “An Argentine trans artist receives an honorable mention at the Venice Biennale,” headlined newspapers and news outlets around the world last year. The European surge that began with Madrid and Queen Letizia in 2022 continued with the Deutsche Bank Foundation's Artist of the Year award in 2023 and a special invitation to participate in the Venice Biennale in 2024, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art.
“When Adriano gave me the news, he said, ‘ I want three works .’ And I said, ‘ I want another meeting.’ He laughed, because no one asks for more meetings when they invite you to the Biennial. You just say yes and that’s it. But I wanted to show off and show more work. From Berlin, I took a plane to Venice and had the meeting. He said, ‘ Okay, I’ll give you 24 meters, which is a lot .’ Because I wanted to put together an installation, do everything, give my all, and he gave me that incredible space, and now he’s going to curate my show in Sao Paulo next year,” she says proudly.
“I don't back down at the first opportunity, not even if I'm crazy. That impulse has always led me to many things. And the truth is, it has nothing to do with love, but with anger. Or an anguish that transforms into anger and makes me feel like I'm up to it. And saying, I want this. It's something that grips me inside, like a fire,” she says. That fire, she acknowledges, is also collective; it has to do with the connections she's made with her trans friends, who today are experiencing firsthand the setbacks of gender policies and the hate speech of Javier Milei's government.
“I have friends who lost their jobs; they returned to the streets after having a formal job for the first time. Others are in the Palermo Woods, and the police are more brutal than ever. That's happening. But I think we've still crossed a barrier. Beyond the current context, there are things we won't go back on, and that's all about the deconstruction of recent years, feminism, everything that's happened, ” she says with conviction.
It's as if two realities coexist: a political one that seeks to sweep away identity politics and laws, and another that inhabits the parallel worlds of social media and artistic circles where dissident identities, for the first time, have a massive audience that admires and listens to them. "I look at TikTok a lot, and there's La Cuerpo and other trans girls or girls from other parts of the world. They have millions of followers and are role models for many of the new generations. The idea is to show that other realities exist, like I do with my work when I go to Europe, for example, and I show that Argentina is neither white nor heterosexual .
We are Present
We are committed to a type of journalism that delves deeply into the realm of the world and offers in-depth research, combined with new technologies and narrative formats. We want the protagonists, their stories, and their struggles to be present.
SUPPORT US
FOLLOW US
Related Notes
We Are Present
This and other stories don't usually make the media's attention. Together, we can make them known.