Rachel “Spicy Gobou” Aquino is a queer interdisciplinary artist whose practice integrates social justice, fashion, photography, somatic embodiment, and visual art. Gobou uses prefigurative futures, eroticism, and visual utopias to challenge institutional dogmas and construct spaces of collective care and emotional resilience.

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 manager, Gobou’s work is anchored by care-work and public liberation. They spent years designing and facilitating transformative art and healing spaces for youth and the public across Austin, Texas. Drawing from years of community leadership and creative facilitation, Gobou’s practice approaches art-making as a practice of transformative justice and abolition.

Their work uses subversive play and experimentation to reimagine the world through queerness and critique the gatekeeping of the creative industries. Gobou rejects conventional artistic rules in pursuit of awe, camp, and freedom. Their practice centers reclaiming agency, identity, and belonging. Gobou creates visual playgrounds where personhood remains proudly ungovernable. Now based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Gobou continues their independent art practice.

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Polaroid Orginals Magazine, INSTITUTE Magazine, PUMP Magazine, Elegant Magazine, Voyage Austin Magazine, SPARK Magazine, Glaze Zine, À la Moda Zine