Leticia Ybarra’s work is based on the relationship between the concrete nature of poetry and the capacity of different forms -visual, gestural and textual- to contain and to circulate excess as a characteristic of queer expression. In order to approach this, their practice also engages with common social archetypes by paying attention to the frameworks that these hegemonic systems impose.

During their residency at Gasworks, Ybarra will connect the figure of the Ballets Russes' dancer Vaslav Nijinsky and that of the famous Spanish ventriloquist and criminal José Luis Moreno by analysing their shared relationship with puppetry. In doing so, the research will take the form of a poetic and artistic engagement with displaced discourses and gestures as strategies for queer enunciation in situations of constraints.

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Ring True

On the occasion of their open studio, artist in residence Leticia Ybarra (via their project, Juf), convenes a poetry reading with S*an D. Henry-Smith, Nisha Ramayya, JOVENDELAPERLA, BERENICE and Leticia Ybarra, exploring the potential and possibilities and limits of enunciation in situations of constraint.

The invited poets will approach the functionality of language in different contexts: those of illness, dreams, translation, nature, love or desire. Their poetry and/or sound practices suggest the necessity to constantly dispute and rebuild those contexts by means of semantic accumulation, phonic slippage, corruptions of meanings or evasive representations.

Juf is a Madrid-based poetry project curated by Leticia Ybarra and Beatriz Ortega Botas.

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Online open studio

A photo gallery of some works made by Leticia during their residency at Gasworks:

About co yo te:
Through the figure of the Spanish poet and anarchist Lucía Sánchez Saornil, the collage/poem co yo te explores coded language that emanates from non normative desires and the gaps where language’s communicative power fails.

About Misdirection:
One key feature of ventriloquism is misdirection, the ability to displace voices. The work critically plays with José Luis Moreno’s biography, a famous Spanish ventriloquist, head of a criminal money laundering plot and known for sexually extorting men. Though José Luis Moreno denies all these, nevertheless for decades he has found a place of enunciation through his puppets, revealing these dark aspects of his life.

About I Shouldn’t Say Cat 
I Shouldn't Say Cat reappropriates the comments that the public made of the homoerotically charged dance of Vaslav Nijinsky, which they referred to as "half-cat" and "half-puppet”. The work also evokes the confusion between power and submission, very present in ventriloquism, through the roles that Diaghilev, even being his lover, imposed on Nijinsky and how the latter answered back with an excessive accumulation of desire and meanings through displaced gestures.

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Artist Biography 

Leticia Ybarra lives and works in Madrid. Their work has been presented at CentroCentro, Madrid; Intersticio, London; Haus Wien, Vienna; Córdova, Barcelona; Fluent, Santander; and Libros Mutantes Art Book Fair, Madrid.

They have published the book of poems Fantasmita eres pegamento (Caniche Editorial). In 2021, together with Beatriz Ortega Botas, they launched the project Juf, and co-curated the study program Gear With Petals at Hangar, Barcelona.

Ybarra teaches Critical Studies (IED) and has curated the three editions of the Gelatina festival at La Casa Encendida, where they worked as Head of the Department of Literature and Thought.

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Residency Supporter

Leticia Ybarra’s residency is supported by Acción Cultural Española (AC/E).