Instagram: @wrauro
Wrauro (they/he) is an artist whose work emerges as a way to process information on both personal and collective levels. They gather material from internet culture and public spaces, creating collages that bring memes into conversation with social and political processes. Wrauro works at specific moments of intervention, bringing together groups and individuals to distribute relevant information in the streets.
Drawing and collage are at the core of their practice. They question, stretch, and adapt these forms across different surfaces, interweaving them with text, tattoo art, and sound. This layering is fundamental to Wrauro’s work.
Their collage practice reclaims the street as a primary space for political education. In response to the Ecuadorian government’s use of media spectacles that manufacture fear and despair, Wrauro creates memes, drawings, collages, and short phrases that appear at bus stops, in parks, at markets, and on university walls. Through these interventions, they expand access to and understanding of information beyond the internet and social media.
Key Themes
Travesti Love · Internet Culture & Street Intervention · Decolonial Resistance
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Q/A with the Artist
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My artistic practice is a layering of images, textures, and text as a way of processing what makes me laugh, what moves me, what worries me, and what inspires me. Sometimes it is moss, other times waterfalls, being travesti, the body, a sound; other times it is Ecuador, Abya Yala, sometimes memes, and sometimes all of it at once.
Amid all the information we consume on social media: memes, TikToks, news, messages of love, messages of hate, forwarded messages, kittens, bombs; my work does not seek simply to “digest” everything we see in order to get rid of it.
Instead, I respond with a similarly intense and jumbled energy, in ways that are excessive and colorful, or through suggestive drawings, to set in motion everything I see, hear, read, touch, laugh at, and cry about: on the bus, while walking, reading, using Instagram, looking through my grandmother’s old WhatsApp messages—“God Bless You,” “Showers of Blessings”—YouTube, Reels, the Instagram stories of my loves, their thoughts, voice notes from other loves, my partner’s reflections, the WhatsApp stories of my family and Don Galo, memes they found funny, memes I identify with, memes that capture me through a made-up word, messages delivered to us by a passing truck, or those that reach us through a 2006 calendar still hanging in the corner store.
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The artwork I selected is based on travesti love. On the many travesti loves in my life: those who care for me and whom I care for; those I admire from afar; those I saw only once; those I know and who know me; those with whom we love each other today, here, tomorrow; my travesti love for myself and with myself; embracing transition and all its waves.
It is about love with those it did not have to last with; those with whom I break the rules, binaries, and hierarchies of the heteronormative family, friendships, and romantic relationships; those with whom we broke chains; those with whom it has been a disaster; those with whom it has been gentle; those connections that contain a little bit of everything.
It is about those with whom it became possible to love differently; those with whom we invented ways of loving—or, rather, rediscovered ways of loving that had been taken from us. Those with whom I was allowed to make mistakes; those with whom we found refuge in times of fear and horror; and those with whom I have been able to share the collage inside my head.
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Beyond Borders, for me, means refusing to participate in imposed borders. It means no longer accepting the border as a norm or a division, but instead understanding it as a terrain of possibility: a terrain filled with intersecting paths.
In the context of this project, it means using art and our diverse trans experiences to connect and enter into dialogue across our differences and distances, recognizing those differences alongside what connects us. It means learning to inhabit certain borders in order to reimagine them.
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To understand that we owe absolutely no one masculinity, femininity, or androgyny, and that a world beyond the logic of man–woman is possible.
A world beyond the man–woman binary must necessarily be antiracist and decolonial.
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I want to live in and help build a travesti future where binary logic does not structure our lives, relationships, and ways of thinking—one with a vision that goes beyond questioning the binary solely within our understanding of gender.
I want to live in and build a travesti future rooted in the lived experiences, wisdom, history, joy, and rage of travestis from Abya Yala, where we never lose sight of our South.
A travesti future free from prison cells and mental cages; a trans future that is diverse and ancient; a travesti future that does not exist exclusively in opposition to cisheteronormativity, nor allow itself to be defined by it.
