Perhaps she is one of the few people who appears exactly as one imagines her. Her appearance is unchanged, whether on stage, on a television set or in front of a cup of coffee with cold milk in a private conversation. Olvido Gara (Mexico City, 1963), Alaska, always wears dark, tight dresses, with very long black hair with two large white streaks framing a heavily painted face. The eyes lined with black Kohl up to the eyelid, the red lips, the thin eyebrows, the very white face. Alaska, Olvido, they are the same person. There are no distinctions, there is no character. Just the name change in search of an identity that he imagined when he was 14 years old and was about to become one of the icons of the Madrid scene.
Alaska and Olvido are the same woman all the time. It doesn’t matter if he goes out to buy vegetables at Madrid’s La Corredera market or to sing his old hymns at a festival, he insists on a conversation with elDiario.es. Also, the same girl that, wearing a white and fluffy wig, Andy Warhol photographed with his polaroid at a party and that would end up becoming his work unknown woman. She claims that she found out several decades later in Alaska Revealeda three-part documentary series produced by Movistar + in collaboration with Shine Iberia that premieres on December 15.
For a person like you, who has been so exposed to the public eye, what is Alaska Revealed?
When they asked me about it I had many doubts. It’s not my first documentary and they all tend to be jack, horse and king. But when I got the approximation of ‘Health, money and love’ – the epigraphs of the three chapters – it began to interest me. I thought everything had already been said about me, we have the data, but not my perspective. The director told me “yes, we know that in ’84 you were successful and sold a million records, but how were you? What was your life like then? We know that you married Mario, but how did it happen?” that is Alaska Revealedan intimate photograph. A self-portrait. What lies behind everything that is known about me.
Have you surprised yourself throughout this moment of introspection?
What a shame not to have always known that you are strong, that you get out, that you have done it. Suddenly what I have built, what I have done, has been placed before me. And I’m very happy, but it’s all seen in perspective. At the moment you don’t know. It’s like relationships: when you’re inside you’re not aware that you should get out of there or that you should fight for it. But when you see it with the distance of time you say: of course. The point is to live it.
Have you encountered something that you thought you had overcome and when you came back to it you realized you weren’t?
Not in the things that have happened. On the issue of economic destruction, almost all of us who participate [en el documental] We were involved at the same time. But this was the first time that I exchanged information with these people or that, when I saw it, things came to me that I didn’t know then. Information that I was missing.
What has been most difficult for me has been realizing that there is a huge hole in the vision that I have of myself, and in the vision that you may have, because those who are no longer there are missing. Paloma Chamorro is not there, all these people who, when I was little, were older and I deeply admired and bet on me are not there. Neither are Costus, Juan Pérez de Ayala, Carlos Berlanga… I have realized that they take up as much space in my daily life as those who are still here. People accompany you at the end when they want.
In that second chapter where money is talked about, it also says that your father was a political refugee. Let’s delve a little deeper into the issue.
Mexico received the exiles very well. It was a country that, I think, offered the best legal conditions with the papers and all that. But I remember that I lived with a man who remembered that he had fought a war and that he had had to flee. And, at the same time, he lived with a woman who went on vacation to Mexico and was never able to return to her country. So, this is a very good teaching about how two people from, theoretically, different worlds can coexist. And if they cannot, it is not because of those issues, but because of the issues that most married couples cannot coexist with. Much more prosaic issues.
It all seems very Manichean to me, this is not Star Wars. This is not the darkness and the other. There are nuances in everything. We are in the 21st century, I believe that the world cannot be divided
Alaska
— Singer
Has this experience of your parents influenced your approach to politics?
Yes. This idea that circulates out there that I don’t get wet, that I don’t position myself… Let’s see, I can’t! To begin with, it all seems very Manichean to me, this is not Star Wars. This is not the darkness and the other. There are nuances in everything. We are in the 21st century, I believe that the world cannot be divided like them. [sus padres] They divided it at the time.
Let’s talk about your mother. It is a central element both in the documentary and in his life. And she seems to have been a strong, brave woman. How has your relationship with her been? How has it shaped your life?
Having the two women as my mother and grandmother did not make me strong, it made me weak. I saw them so strong that it made me small. I saw how they had coped with having to run away from a country and I thought “if it happens to me I’ll die.” Then you always overcome it, of course. You overcome everything in life.
He also says that his mother was a forward-thinker. That when she was 13 years old you took her shopping in London and you took the opportunity to buy records and band t-shirts. In Spain there was a vision that you were a groundbreaking young girl who was going to discover rock, but at first you were just a girl accompanying your mother.
Yeah! (Laughter) I was accompanying him with the excuse that I was supposed to speak English and that I was going to translate everything for him. But then I’m very shy and I’m embarrassed to talk and it didn’t help him at all (more laughter). But being able to travel at that time in your life and see other people and see other things has a lot to do with who you become later. There you realize that there is more life than what you see in your daily life and you think, hey! I’m missing something.
When did you learn to speak English?
At school, when I was four years old, I started writing and reading in English before Spanish. Something that I will be grateful to my parents all my life, because in the 70s the information was in international magazines in dribs and drabs. Or with the books that someone could bring you, with the records that they could give you.
How was the change of disembarking from Mexico to a country still under the yoke of a dictatorship?
When you are ten years old the concept of dictatorship does not exist. Your problem is that you are wearing a school uniform when you have never worn one before. That the school uniform has to be a skirt below the knee when you wore miniskirts. Those are the things in your world: that there is a black and white television channel and you had color television where you watched the Jackson Five and that suddenly no longer exists.
You experience an adaptation and at first you think it is getting worse. You think that your world has fallen apart and you can’t find references. But it lasted me about a month. I found the things that I liked, I started to enjoy the television that was here and the gossip magazines that were great for having fun and getting to know the characters. And the street map! I remember that I studied it like an encyclopedia and then I already knew the city in which I lived. You adapt to everything, even if you think you are going to die.
In the documentary, under the heading ‘Health’, he speaks openly about the cosmetic surgery he has undergone throughout his life. How has the world evolved with that topic?
It is said that we are in a phase of acceptance, but I think not. There is always a judgment towards the women and men who undergo surgery. As if they were more frivolous. This is like someone who is pretty and has to constantly show that she is also smart. For my part, I do not talk about health through surgery, but surgery is part of my corpus, which plays to make everything better. Just as I take nutritional supplements, because I have surgery, in the same way that I also read to exercise my head.
It is said that we are in a phase of acceptance, but I think not. There is always a judgment towards the women and men who undergo surgery. As if they were more frivolous
Alaska
— Singer
But it is true that there is a certain “closet” and those who talk about surgery are always vedettes or artists. A label is then placed. I would like to see what would happen if those who underwent surgery and talked about it were writers or intellectuals because, my friends, at this point, today everyone retouches themselves! And I don’t get carried away by my madness because I don’t like it. life in it, but if I were totally free I would like to be like a comic and tend towards hyperfeminization, because it seems like a wonderful weapon to me, and play with it. Also with the nerve, which I have always experienced as a game.
And the game world leads to Drag. When she created her identity as Alaska, drag was something reserved almost for men.
I feel like a transvestite because the term Drag Queen does not exist in official terminology. But that’s it, in the end they are boys who make a fantasy and I thought, why can’t a girl make that same fantasy? What happens is that it’s too small for me, because in drag you go home and you take off your clothes. And that’s what’s hard for me. I have always seen cross-dressing as showing yourself as you are. I wouldn’t take it off when I returned home, but of course, what I want is impossible because you can’t be a slave to your image. So I have settled into a middle ground where I feel good.
Another topic that she addresses in the documentary is speculation surrounding the sexuality of her husband, Mario Vaquerizo.
We still cannot see a feminine man, a man with a pen. You assume that things are going to be said in certain sectors, and that’s fine. But then there are people who go to the Pride demonstration and are compassionate and vindictive, but who are also with the issue… What are you telling me? Leave the banner, be real and accept people as they are. When I discovered David Bowie I saw that there were different men than the ones I had been taught, but today we still carry the stereotype.
It has been said about you that you have been transgressive in your youth and conservative in your maturity, what do you have to say about this?
I have always been a conservative person. I am a calm person. I have never done anything to transgress, I have never done anything because I considered it revolutionary. I have done what I thought I had to do to do what I wanted. To say those things about myself is not to know me, but I think that in the documentary it is very clear how I talked about money at 17 years old or how I talked about life in Beverly Hills at 18. That is my world and when I say that I am conservative what I want to say is that I have always been an older person. And that has nothing to do with conservatism or rebellion for rebellion’s sake, which I don’t understand. I do not understand transgression for the sake of transgression and having to join a dogma because the dogma changes, and if this was previously the Catholic Church, it is now Greta Thunberg. That doesn’t suit me.
#Alaska #conservative #transgressive
