Wenmimareba Klobah Collins
class of 2023
Wenmimareba Klobah Collins is an artist, performer, writer, and cultural critic from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her creative and academic work explore the Caribbean—specifically Puerto Rico—as a geo-social and spiritual space. She’s interested in the studies of regional linguistics, speculative reimagination, textiles, and urban music. Klobah Collins seeks to engage multiple forms of resistance-making that serve as a model for creating paths into the future. She holds a BFA and a BA in Literature from the University of Puerto Rico (2020) and a dual-degree MFA/MA in Creative Writing (poetry) and Visual & Critical Studies (VCS) at the California College of the Arts. She works as a museum educator and is passionate about cultivating curiosity, hands-on learning, and ecological stewardship.
Wenmi’s Thesis
Most Campy Objects are Urban: Transgression in Villano Antillano’s Muñeca
This paper argues in favor of a practice of queer optimism, joy, and revelry in the face of ongoing grief and violence. I assert that the work of Puerto Rican artist/performer Villana Santiago Pacheco (“Villano Antillano”) operates as a polyvalent expressive practice that transgresses the sonic, visual, and social traditions of the Urban Puerto Rican musical scene through campiness, friction, and blatant sexuality. I examine how she explores ideas of perception and identity by teasing, questioning, and undoing the linguistic and visual semiotic imaginaries that exist in Puerto Rican society regarding trans women/folks, while also pointing to the different registers of labor that she and, more broadly, trans women perform (including, but not limited to, sex work). Villano ultimately shows us new ways of creating and maintaining sociality, of paving forward through the dancefloor, through the street, through the conditions that seek to keep us dispossessed.