Diego Ramirez is an artist, writer and facilitator based in Naarm, Australia. His work embodies a sinister supernatural aesthetic combining humour in cynicism with imagery of vampires and religious figures. This skepticism and darkness is influenced by the corruption in his home country, Mexico, the apocalyptic zeitgeist and ‘callousness of identity politics.’
Ramirez works in a multitude of mediums including resin, neon, performance, text and murals. He is also a regular contributor to an esteemed range of publications across Australia including Art and Australia and The Australian Book Review. The former director of Seventh Gallery was also a peer assessor at Australia Council and has appeared on panels for Creative Victoria and City of Melbourne.
In this Colour Box Studio interview, ten years after his first interview with us, Ramirez discusses the sequel to The Perfect Ever (or how oil discovered humans) for an upcoming show at RMIT Gallery, portraying a ‘Goth Softboi’ and his PhD research exploring the term “Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD)” in the social sphere of the Australian Arts industry.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.
My name is Diego, and I’ve always found it hard to describe myself. Growing up, I felt embarrassed by how much I struggled with this question during school activities. Today, I believe the difficulty to self define says more about me than anything else. I’m an artist, writer and work in the arts.
How did you start your creative practice and why?
I believe my practice began when I encountered Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí in a street market, as a teenager. In a very naive understanding of the film, I saw a world that didn’t make sense, and this reflected my youthful experience of life at the time. This ability to understand our cultural surroundings through spectatorship and making, continues to be the reason why I’m interested in art.
Where did you grow up and how has it influenced your practice?
I grew up in Guadalajara, México. This changes from time to time, but right now I believe it impacted my capacity to tolerate institutional bureaucracy, as I grew up in an unregulated environment. Every time I receive a long email, with more than one PDF from an arts organisation, I feel like making a flying kite with a print out of their cultural safety policy, to escape into a faraway land. I use cash, and write on notebooks. It’s not normal how we accept oversight, corporatisation and bureaucratisation as acceptable living conditions.
Tell us about your past creative projects. What has been a highlight so far?
Back in 2019, I performed my work Once More, With Diversity Feeling at Kings ARI, an ‘audition’ for a Mexican vampire in the canned Buffy The Vampire Slayer reboot, which was mediatised as emphasising diversity. Inspired by novelty acts, I sang pitchy songs with over the top lyrics—like a goth softboi—hoping to get ‘casted’. The audience wanted to laugh at me but didn’t want to be ‘problematic’. This kind of perverse tension is now a staple in the push and pull that characterises my output. It honestly just taught me a lot about audiences.
Tell us about your current project?
I’m making a sequel to my work The Perfect Ever (or how oil discovered humans) (2021-23), for an upcoming show at RMIT Gallery. The first iteration carefully re-edits scenes from the Mexican film ‘Las Rosas del Milagro’ (‘The Miracle Roses’, 1960) to hijack the image of the Virgin Guadalupe with an eerie and viscous entity. The original film—acquired from a Catholic shop—tells the story of how Saint Diego encountered Mary. My work takes advantage of the rudimentary graphics of the source material, to explore the notion that speculative characters in Hollywood films resemble an audiovisual miracle by exceeding the reality of the set.
I’m repeating the same process with another film called ‘La Virgen de Guadalupe’ (1976), which copies the same structure from Las Rosas del Milagro. In fact, the latter also copies the structure of the apparitions from earlier films. This allows me to alter them with the same process and synchronise them in two channels to create a doubling effect.
Who or what inspires your practice?
I’m very inspired by this period of time circa 2015-2018, when a form of hyperbolic social justice gained validity, after users in Tumblr shaped it through re-sharing their feelings online. It entered the wider media consciousness via sites like Buzzfeed (10 reasons why blah is problematic), and found its place in university culture. To shape the worldview of arts writers who began to tackle issues of diversity and diaspora art. This is connected to things like vigilante call outs on social media, where everyone seems to be employed by social media platforms to generate engagement in an outrage economy.
Where do you feel most creative and why?
I have a fairly utilitarian notion of what it means to be creative, so I generally just feel creative when I sit down to be creative. However, if I’m well fed and spending time of leisure, in a state of proper sleep and relaxation, I understandably experience increased motivation. I also think coming up with ideas for me is more about staying engaged with the work of others, rather than my own self. When I’m on track with some deep dive, and I’m experiencing an atmosphere that is strongly connected with the work I’m observing—it just clicks.
What’s the worst feedback you’ve received from a show or work?
Once I was doing a studio visit with an artist and he said, “are you aware that your work is really ugly?”. That was pretty funny. Sometimes people say things like, “if I wanted something sarcastic or ironic, I would call you.” Every now and then I write a polemic with a performative voice and last time, someone said they suspected it was a confession. It felt like an achievement, I loved it. But I think it was meant to be unflattering.
What gets you through creative challenges or tough industry times?
Time, I suppose.
What future projects are you looking forward to?
I started my PhD this year, looking at the term Cultural and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) in the social sphere of the Australian arts, through its increased circulation in artist run organisations (ARI) from 2017 onwards. I was the Director of an artist run space from 2018-2023 and let me tell you, there’s a lot to talk about. I am looking forward to becoming Dr. Cultural Diversity.
Whose work are you digging at the moment?
Right now, I’m following the work of Stefa Panoschi, Ari Angkasa, and Beatrice Gabriel Rubio due to the relationships they establish with arts organisations. I’m interested in their sensibility because it operates beyond the notion of seeking change through representation in programming. Their work is also really funny. They all have an embodied insight into the administrative culture that animates contemporary art spaces in some way or another. Angkasa and Rubio have tackled this directly in their works and to my knowledge Panoschi hasn’t yet. But I suspect it’s coming.
Where can we find and follow you online?
My instagram is @diegoismonster, my website is www.diego-ramirez.net and my phone number is 04…oh wait, I’m not meant to give you that.