Today we’d like to introduce you to Rachel Aquino.
Hi Rachel, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Rachel “Spicy Gobou” Aquino is a self-taught queer interdisciplinary artist whose visual arts practice integrates fashion design, photography, sceneography, and dance performance to build visual utopias. Their practice uses eroticism and prefigurative futures to investigate queer agency and freedom.
Gobou creates visual playgrounds where personhood remains proudly ungovernable, rejecting conventional artistic rules in pursuit of awe and camp. Their practice centers reclaiming identity and belonging by using subversive play and experimentation to reimagine the world through queerness.
Gobou is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Philosophy. Having served as a National Service member, Teaching Artist, and Community Engagement + Programs Manager, Gobou’s work is anchored by care-work and public liberation. They spent years designing and facilitating transformative art and healing spaces for the public. Building from years of community leadership and creative facilitation, Gobou approaches art-making as a practice of transformative justice and abolition.
Now based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Gobou continues their independent art practice under the trade name Gobou Gallery.
Over the past four years, my work has evolved from community-embedded art and facilitation in Texas into full-scale practice combining material manipulation, performance, and fine-arts photography in the Netherlands. My earlier milestones focused on print culture and participatory zines as tools for public liberation, including features in university fashion-art zines and grassroots community art publications, alongside foundational work in fashion photography.
Parallel to my social practice, I developed my visual language through editorial fine arts and fashion photography and print culture. My early work focused on scenography for my fine-arts photography stories, which are now known as my visual utopias. I then dived deeper into storytelling through adorning the body with make-up and hair art, and styling for my fine-arts photography stories. As my practice expanded, these narrative principles developed into a wider practice of using the body and my body to perform in front of audiences. Rather than treating these as disparate mediums, I operate across them as a unified ecosystem.
Liberation, eroticism, and queer utopia has always been core tenets of my practice and to further develop my practice I learned from and was mentored by makers and performers across different sectors: queer photographers, fashion designers, writers, burlesque performers, strippers, commercial dancers, and contemporary dancers on pole.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I read this question and giggled because of what a journey it has been to discover who I am as a person and as an artist. Perhaps one that is always living and changing. I am always running towards myself on the horizon. I think the biggest struggle was that I did not know where my art belonged or where I belonged. There wasn’t a clear pathway for me as a working artist, especially as a self taught artist. Breaking into the industry was one of the scariest times of uncertainty for me because it required a lot of risk, trials, and failure. Often ones I could not afford. It still demands this.
Being an artist existing at the margins or in the between (the diaspora, the bridge, the hazy space between countries) is also where the most creative, resilient, and adaptive life grows. Intentional adaptation is how we cultivate the capacity to be in right relationship with change… We are learning to adapt to the changes that are happening around us, and to shape the change that is emerging from within us.
In nature, an ecosystem doesn’t ask a tree or an oak leaf to earn its right to exist; its presence and relationship to the soil is its belonging. A book that I love called Emergent strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown critiques the idea that dominant structures (like white Western European norms or nation-states) hold the key to our legitimacy. You will never get authentic belonging from systems or people who rely on hierarchy to exist. Belonging is emergent and co-created, not granted. Art, music, and performance all facilitate belonging. In it belonging becomes decentralized. I one day realized it lives in the micro-sanctuaries I built: my queerness, my art, my movement, my trusted community, and my relationship with my own body. These micro sanctuaries are my utopias. It all begins here. In these small, sovereign territories.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Gobou Gallery?
Coming to the Netherlands I found a new sense of purpose in my art practice. One that was ever-present, but just waiting for my acceptance; I’ve come to embrace that my success is defined in realizing my talents audaciously and to its highest potential. I’ve been tested financially, emotionally, relationally in a way that gave me confidence navigating the arts/cultural eco-system and community. There’s been long periods of sacrifice and working 7 days a week for slivers of artistic freedom, yet everything finally taking shape with an incredible community behind me is my greatest point of pride.
Gobou Gallery is the trade name my artist practice operates under. What is unique to me is my visual language and mission: I approach art-making as a practice of transformative justice and abolition. Not necessarily through its subject matter, but through how I build, construct, and relate. My practice is prefigurative. Meaning it is a commitment to creating and living the conditions of liberation in the present rather than waiting for structural permission. In my work, aesthetic expression and material creation are speculative blueprints for a world beyond institutional coercion. I am most known for my photo stories/visual utopias and pole dance performances. It has been an honor to build queer visual utopias in the community and to help others tell their story.
I support fellow emerging artists and marginalized creators to build sustainable and ethical creative practices outside normative boxes by providing behind-the-scenes insights into production, honest personal reflections, and deep dives into arts and visual culture. I am multidisciplinary in the services and art that I offer and can be booked for photoshoots, dance sessions/performances, cultural programming, and consultations. I also sell art prints on my website and have a blog that people are welcome to subscribe to for further insights into my practice!
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
When I reflect on my time in Austin, Texas I love how vivid the city felt. It’s full of life, nature, color, music, and art. There’s just so much to connect to and thats why I lived there for 7 years. I fell in love with the underground fashion, arts, and techno scene. Not to mention, the sun seems to always be shining and I wanted to build my life there. At the 6 year mark I felt that I had personally and artistically outgrown the city. I wished for more opportunities and accessible points to be a maker in the city. Eventually, I felt disconnected from my purpose/practice and the people; Thats why I moved on. A lot of the artist I knew moved on from Austin for more opportunities in their practice as well.
I will say, the absolute favorite part of the city I still hold onto and would return to in a heart beat is Black box Creative. This is the community and studio that raised me and nobody in the world does it like them.
Pricing:
- Photoshoots start at €95
- Creative Consultations/Mentorships/Review sessions start at €65
- Substack subscription €7/month
- Art Prints start at €5
- Dance private lessons start at €60
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.spicygobou.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spicygobou/
- Other: https://tangledlintbaby.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips
