I perform because there are certain things that can only be said through this this way of thinking about art.

If I were to try to remember how long I've been interested in performance, I'd have to go to a time before I knew it existed or that was its name. I might not even define what I was doing at the time as performance, but as a space of liberty that allowed me carry out creative actions: either I would arrive at school dressed up, as I did many times as a child, or I would organize, as I did to have several of my fellows-students suddenly interact with the rest of the class in order to illustrate a talk I was giving on psychiatric problems as I did in secondary school. the rearm performance wasn't even used in those days, even though "happening" was a word I knew well as a child.

By the time I was studying in San Carlos, in the middle of the seventies, I took my first performance workshop with a German teacher named Ingo who came to Mexico because he was a friend of sculptor Sebastián, who was my teacher. He made us participate in group dynamics and yoga exercises and then sent us off to the main square disguised as a cloud. It was a lot of fun.

But I really started getting interested in this type of work when I went to the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, California, in 1978.

It was a particularly spectacular moment for performance and for feminist art. When we weren't going to see the work of Allan Kaprow, Chris Burden, Rachel Rosenthal or Linda Montano, they would come to lecture us. The first performance anthologies were being published and magazines such as High Performance had been going on for a while. The Waitresses, Mother Art and The Feminist Art Workers were some of the groups doing performance and some of my teachers were splendid artists such as Nancy Angelo, Cherrie Gauke y Vanalyn Green.

At the time feminist artists particularly interested in performance because it did not comply with the aesthetic cannons imposed by patriarchal culture and because, whether one likes it or not, gender is something always implicit in this type of work.

During my stay in Los Angeles I formed part of the team working for Ariadne: A Social Art Network, the group formed by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowits. They were really something. Suzanne had studied with Kaprow and Judy Chicago and Leslie Labowits with Joseph Beuys. They were really into doing feminist, politically charged performances through the mass media. Their work continuously broke any definition of what art was, and even of what at the was considered performance.

I participated full in a piece of their called Making it Safe, which I would actually define as a Visual Project, for it was a work which lasted several months and consisted in a large variety of artistic and political actions which were presented before an audience, making it participate or non audience directed pieces.

When I came back to Mexico at the beginning of the nineties, I was formed two of the three feminist art groups we had. Both of them were centered around performance. One of them was Tlacuilas y Retrateras and it was integrated by the students in a workshop I gave at San Carlos. This group was responsible for the legendary performance called La Fiesta de Quince Años which took place at San Carlos in 1984 which included a collective performance which was the Quinceañeras ball, to different performances by several collectives.

The second group was Polvo de Gallina Negra, in which I had the privilege of working with Maris Bustamante for 10 years. Our work, which always had a clear political statement although our tone was inevitably humorous, used all sorts of supports and spaces, from radio, television and the press, to demonstrations and museums.

Throughout the nineties most of my performances have been with Victor Lerma as Pinto mi Raya. The goal of the work we do is to lubricate the art system, so some of our pieces end up having very strange forms. We might integrate a press clipping service or get a witch to do a cleaning of an art institution or invite art critics to exchange roles with artists and exhibit while the former write in their columns.

However, my own performances, those I do on my own, are almost always a mixture between giving a talk and a performance. Sometimes it looks more like one thing than the other, but its definitely the format I feel most comfortable in and one which allows me to mix the visual and texts.

The performances I am most interested, both as a participant as well as a spectator, are those that break with traditional definitions and formats. I like artists who follow their obsessions and for whom performance isn't something they do occasionally but a way of thinking, integrated into their lives.

México DF.

May 12, 2003.