La Basurita
Mariposa Divina
June 27th - August 1st, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, June 27th, 7-10pm
A fable / crónicá:
My only childhood memory is my mother whispering in my ear, “Little basurita, one day you will die.” It turned me on. For the first time, I realized my godlike power.The secret name was revealed, and after wailing and a loud gasp, I could feel massive butterfly wings sprouting through my shoulder blades. I flew past my own desert grave, then reincarnated as MARIPOSA DIVINA, a transexual in a windy city far from home. My new life was no paradise, but I made friends with the serpent women, and we made a protective pact to watch each others’ backs and crochet our broken hearts together.
[Mariposa’s poem of El Espejo:The Mirror, from when I was nine] Dec, 30, 2005
Con el espejo veo mi rostro
Y el espejo me cuida, no otro
Con el yo voy a estar
Y alli me voy a quedar
Con el veo cosas maravillosas
Fantasía, logros , y mariposas
Preparare mi veliz
Para ir con él y ser feliz
Mi espejo se llama miguel
Y no me separare de el
In the mirror I see my face
Only the mirror takes care of me, no one else
I will be with him
And that's where I’ll stay
With him I see wonderful things
Fantasies, realisations, and butterflies
I’ve prepared my suitcase
To go with him and be happy
My mirror’s name is Miguel
And I will never separate from him
La Basurita is a tender, hopeful tragedy in three nonlinear acts, populated by glazed ceramic stransculptures and fabricated metal shapes wrapping around the landscapes of Co-Prosperity’s window exhibition spaces. The acts, in no particular order, and without giving away which window maqueta maps onto our many secret names, are as follows:
ACT ! [ Pleasuregarden / Sueño con Serpientes ]
Genderfluid fashion and giddy get-ups! Butterflies frolicking in the light of golden hour! When I close my eyes and the sun swirls on my lids, this is the dissociative parable of paradise I see. Here in the pleasuregarden I can play and flirt with the earth to my ass’s content. Writhing in pleasure, I multiply and bloom a thousand little deaths.
Act ? [Darkness / Rot / Transformation ]
I face my death over and over, then cross to the other side. Memento mori is ancient medicine.
I lean into the mirror and take a selfie with my dark shadow selves.
ACT </3 [ Exceptional Friendships / Creating stars ]
Resting in my friends’ arms: is this where home is?. Even if it’s ephemeral I can trust we will find each other again in our memories, dreams, and promises.
Visual reference points / inspiration:
Niki de Saint Phalle’s Queen Califia’s Magic Circle in California, Ana Teresa Fernandez’s border performance art in heels, Javier Tellez’s human cannonball, Helio Oiticica’s Parangolés, Asco’s walking murals, Ana Mendieta’s facial hair transplant performances, Adrian Piper’s Mything Being, Sofia Moreno’s trash gender art with needles, heels and snakes, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Sueño Con Serpientes chapter in Borderlands.
Keywords:
Archetypes, matrilineal, faerie, frolicking, paradisepleasuregardens, trash/asco, turning windows into mirrors, inner child, world-making, fables, snake women, healing, rest, composure, holding self, dissociation, imagining, nonbinary faggotry and friends, sensual play, maquetas, disposability, fashion.
Becoming Refuse: Mariposa Divina’s La Basurita
Noa Micaela Fields
In the song “La Basurita,” ranchera queen Beatriz Adriana exclaims, “Yo soy basurita / Soy basurita que arrastra el viento” (“I am trash, I am the trash blowing in the wind”). In a similar spirit, there’s a meme remix of Katy Perry’s “Fireworks” that fixates on the line, “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag,” and transforms the chorus into: “Cause baby you’re a plastic bag,” rather than “firework.” A self-deprecative reversal where the listener becomes refuse rather than incendiary spectacle. These could be two sonic epigraphs for Mariposa Divina’s window exhibition at Co-Prosperity Sphere, La Basurita, which leans into the role of trash as if it were a tarot archetype, embodying this reclamation to an extreme.
In America’s wasteful and necropolitical culture, Black and brown, working class, queer and trans people are also portrayed as and made disposable. Just as “queer” or “puta” reclaims a slur, to call oneself trash might be to celebrate possibilities in the inverted values of degeneracy, refusal, and worthlessness. Instead, embracing the dirty glamour in the everyday transforms shame into pride. To see a carousel of pleasure and wonder in one’s own quotidian actions which our society condemns, abuses, and tries to erase.
Take in the scene of a mannequin in the window styled in a trash bag halter dress: glistening and form-fitting, a Cinderella-worthy transformation, like Stephen Varble’s gender subversive “trash couture,” which incorporated eclectic found rubbish like milk cartons into other-worldly drag costumes for street art performances. Divina’s dress is displayed in the window as if outside a boutique and not hidden in the shadows, willing any passerby to stop in awe and desire.
Divina reminds us we are surrounded by a plethora of waste available for us to repurpose as a vehicle for self-expression if we exercise a little resourcefulness—like Arte Povera (“poor art”), drawing on whatever’s readily available. Art and poetry can consecrate these materials as portals, highlighting the refined visions they offer. Whole worlds, treasure where others see only trash. I think of the baroque sentences of insurgent Chilean travesti writer Pedro Lemebel’s cronicas which spellbindingly describe quotidian lifeworlds of sex workers, mythologizing a streetwalker as “the wonder of the witching hour, a flash of mother-of-pearl catching the light in a city whorehouse.” This is no trick or illusion: just the larger than life but totally true story of us, as seen by us, told for us.
For the exhibition’s description, Divina wrote a fable that similarly exemplifies reinvention as self-mythology, finding unexpected erotic pleasure in put-downs and reminders of fatality:
My only childhood memory is my mother whispering in my ear, “Little basurita, one day you will die.” It turned me on. For the first time, I realized my godlike power. The secret name was revealed, and after wailing and a loud gasp, I could feel massive butterfly wings sprouting through my shoulder blades. I flew past my own desert grave, then reincarnated as MARIPOSA DIVINA, a transexual in a windy city far from home. My new life was no paradise, but I made friends with the serpent women, and we made a protective pact to watch each others’ backs and crochet our broken hearts together.
The fable has an arc of melodrama swinging from feelings of familial rejection to realizations of a secret name and creaturely transformation. (Isn’t melodrama widely the trashiest TV genre?) Little basurita, one day you will die: skull motifs in the show cast death’s shadow, emphasizing the life and death stakes of existing on society’s fringe in conditions of precarity and risk, all the while also functioning as a memento mori, marking time’s passing and reminding us to embrace ephemerality. Even as La Basurita holds melodrama, it is also tender and hopeful. In one serene sculpture of self-embrace, glazed grey-blue ribbons trussing serpentine braided hair echo in gentle rhythm with matching teardrops and nails, an example of style as a form of emotional fortification, a protective armor when feeling vulnerable.
Each detailed ceramic tableau begs to be seen from all angles. While this wasn’t possible for all of the sculptures in a window display, Divina shrewdly placed some of their sculptures on revolving cake platters to provide the 360° views. Get up close to take in the texture of the glaze heightening the sheen of skin and flushed cheeks, or on-point colorful genderfuck dyke fashion accessories, like a leopard print harness, fishnets, and red heels. There is also slutty, big time sensuality, as in a ceramic bust of a pair of hips, sagging jean shorts exposing the jockstrap and rampant pubic hair underneath.
The windows house three color-coordinated intermedia installations, situating the glazed ceramic transculptures alongside fabricated metalwork and fabric screen prints. There’s variety but also a satisfying rhythm in the visual vocabulary that appears across textiles and paintings with butterflies, hearts, and playful, genderfluid Spanish. I am staggered by the breadth of Divina’s talents in fashion, ceramics, metalwork, and painting separately, but even more by their vision for bringing it all together to suggest another world of possibility and transformation where other trash and misfits belong, too.