Studio Lenca
Studio Lenca aka Jose Campos is an artist from El Salvador living and working in the UK. He was born in La Paz, El Salvador and had to flee the country during its violent civil war during the late 1980’s. He travelled to the US by land, illegally with his mother. He grew up in San Francisco, California as a queer minority in the gaze of a strictly conservative administration as an undocumented ‘illegal alien’. Ultimately, He found refuge in the UK and became a British Citizen in 2007. This experience of being uprooted serves as a framework for his ideas to be read by others as themes of identity, belonging and oppression are universal.As a queer member of the Latinx diaspora , his work is focused on ideas surrounding difference, knowledge and visibility. He works with performance, video, painting and sculpture. His work often starts through personal memories, creative activism or underpinned by different forms of praxis. He works under the name of ‘Studio Lenca’ as the language of ‘studio’ refers to a space for experimentation and a place that is constantly shifting. Lenca refers ancestors his native El Salvador