Rachel “Spicy Gobou” Aquino is a queer transdisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on prefiguring conditions of liberation and queer agency.

Gobou approaches art-making as a practice of transformative justice and abolition, using prefigurative methodology in how they construct and relate. Their artistic practice is committed to creating and living the conditions of liberation in the present rather than waiting for structural permission. Gobou works across sensory pathways to investigate queer agency: using dance and performance to feel autonomy in the body, visual direction and lens-based media to imagine it in space, and textiles to physically construct it with the hands.

Gobou’s visual utopias are speculative blueprints for a world beyond institutional coercion. Their work rejects conventional rules in pursuit of awe, camp, and subversive play. Gobou is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Philosophy. Alongside years in cultural arts programming and creative facilitation, their artistic practice is informed by care-work, counter-archiving, and public liberation. Now based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Gobou continues their independent art practice under the trade name Gobou Gallery.

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