Mis amigos
los monstruos
My Monster Friends is an autobiographical project that explores
the metaphor of the monster to talk about that which has been stripped
of its humanity.
Through this mutant figure and landscapes that reimagine family and personal memories,
the project delves into reflections where difference—whether arising from migration, sexual dissidence, or social class—becomes a reason for exclusion, suspicion, and exoticization. The monster is not only a threat, but also a
mirror: it reflects what society fears to recognize about itself, or what
it tries to flee from.
This visual essay began to take shape among photographs from the family archive —especially of my Ukrainian relatives who fled during World War II—and my own experiences as a queer person, growing up in working-class neighborhoods and hearing how my family called the gringos or me mariposón (a hybrid body
that I imagined between human and lepidopteran).
At this intersection of stories and bodies, an intimate inventory emerges that reclaims the monstrous as a mutant surface, a place of escape and a trace of what is
rejected but never disappears.
I remember the fear my parents felt when they suspected that their son was different. I was a child, and my imagination led me to think that I was a
monster, one of those that no one wanted on television, in church, or on the street.
Exile and monstrosity have deeply permeated my identity. In the foreground is my family's story, one that I always imagined as a monstrous children's tale. As a child, I always thought of them with burnt skin and crystal-colored eyes, trying to communicate in a language foreign to the ears of the natives.
Then that narrative of the monstrous migrated to my own body, which was traversed by different mutant and queer metaphors: parchita, pato, catirrucio, among an inexhaustible number of rarefied rhetorical figures to name my difference.