Dreaming Snakes: Acts of illusion and protest in the work of Sergio Hernández Francés

Research Fellow Jorge Bordello presents the work of Mexican artist Sergio Hernández Francés (1964-1995), who worked across multimedia theater, performance and video. Connecting his early work as an actor and his collaborations with the rock band Santa Sabina to his later experimental video work, Bordello illuminates Sergio’s wide-ranging influence on Mexican cultural history—from the ‘rock en tu idioma’ movement, Mexican video art, and literature.

Leer en espanol aquí.

In Mexico, the concept of a long-term HIV survivor artist is elusive. With the exception of photographer Oscar Sanchez, as well as artists who choose not to make their status public or the motif for their work. Cases like conceptual artist Ulises Carrion, who migrated to the Netherlands, and Teo Hernandez, an experimental filmmaker who achieved recognition in Spain—although they could not evade the gravity of AIDS—managed to escape historiographic oblivion by dying in Europe.

This is why I was so excited to discover the work of Sergio Hernández Francés. My introduction to his practice came in the form of two video pieces which had been rescued by video art pioneer Ximena Cuevas shortly before Sergio’s death—Ximena had integrated them into her famous collection Los Archivos X. I was immediately struck by his frankness in talking about his status in real time, as well as his experimentation across the languages of theater, cinema, performing arts, and the new resources of digital intervention. More striking is the institutional silence that surrounds his work. His memory has been tenderly maintained primarily through anecdotes from his friends—themselves once underground artists who are now established cultural authorities.

As a visual artist living with HIV I wanted to take on the task of tracking down data associated with anecdotes about this important figure in a time of political turmoil and AIDS panic. In this pursuit of information that was unjustly omitted from the indexes of seronegative academia, I also sought to interpret the dream of an ancestor that until recently I did not know I had.

I. Chroma Theater

Sergio was born in Mexico City in 1964 amidst simmering unrest between student movements, workers, and intellectuals and the repressive federal government, which would culminate in a massacre ten days before the 1968 Olympics opening ceremony held in the city.¹. Sergio’s family had arrived from Spain a couple of decades earlier as exiles from the civil war, settling and thriving in the Coyoacán municipality in the south of the city. There, Sergio attended a renowned private school, Heroes de la Libertad, and later worked in his family’s bookstore whenever he needed money for his projects. The younger of two boys, his brother Enrique introduced him to the music of Supertramp and gringo television. Sergio enjoyed his family’s economic position: they were able to provide him with technology—he was the first in his circle to have a Discman—and space to work.

Even with all his comforts, in 1986—perhaps because of his family history or his rebellious personality—Sergio, then a theater student, participated in the strike called by the Consejo Estudiantil Universitario (CEU), a large organization of the different faculties of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). The strike was called in opposition to reforms proposed by the rector that threatened free tuition and student rights. His faculty took turns representing the students and he served as a temporary student leader.

During this strike he participated in Amerika, an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s play that the students of the Colegio Universitario de Teatro (CUT) staged in a basement where old scenery was stored.² Adapting the space with their own resources—Sergio brought a piano from home—they painted murals and graffiti and built a labyrinthine stage. Sergio played the main character Karl Rossmann, a young European immigrant who suffers from American greed.

That same year, they premiered Vox Thanatos—thanks to the success of their previous play they were able to use the faculty of architecture’s forum as their stage.³ The play takes place after an atomic explosion that leaves people with white hair—the actors all dyed their hair blonde and drew expressionistic dark circles under their eyes—and forces everyone to live in a dome and rehearse a concert in the main square of the decaying capital.

During this time, Sergio defined his artistic personality, and was applauded for his talent as an actor. His later work, which was mystical and animalistic, would maintain a performative quality. The mid-1980s also saw him meet many who would become his dearest friends and collaborators, especially the singer Rita Guerrero. Musicians, such as those who would later form the famous gothic rock group Santa Sabina, gathered around both productions. Santa Sabina was fundamental to the rock en tu idioma movement, which included groups such as Caifanes, Maldita Vecindad, and El TRI, and was characterized by youthful neighborhood chronicles in a context of police persecution of all countercultural manifestations.

This inaugurated nearly a decade of collaboration with Santa Sabina, during which time Sergio continued to explore the relationship between body and image by producing specific video and performance pieces for the band’s concerts.⁴ In a performance at the Roxy, a famous nightclub in Guadalajara, Sergio set up a cloth that fell in the middle of the stage. Fire and shadows were projected onto the scrim between Rita and himself, who was dressed as a devil, and a woman entered and performed an exorcism on him. These pieces were recorded in his apartment in the Condesa neighborhood or on field trips to La Purificación in the State of Mexico where they did their own makeup, costumes, and production. The resulting aesthetic was scrappy but somehow European—a fantastical wasteland Situationism.

Between 1989 and 1990, he traveled to Barcelona and Boston without stopping his production. When he returned to Mexico he brought two bombs under his arm: an HIV diagnosis and a new thirst for capturing time on tape, both of which he would always carry with him. Coincidentally, an experimental film and video scene was forming in Mexico City that shared the same neighborhood concerns and the chronicle format of rock en tu idioma. During this time, filmmaker Sarah Minter—who followed with her camera the Mierdas Punk anti-system gangs from the eastern periphery of the city, who were bonded by their hatred of authority and lives marked by misery—gave what is known as the first video art workshop in Mexico at the cultural center Casa de Lago.⁵ This workshop was also where other video artists in formation came together, such as Domenico Capello, with whom Sergio would later collaborate. The underground scene had begun to emerge on the museum’s floor.

In these moments of terrible crisis for Sergio he found tools to pour the personal into the artistic. He was specifically enchanted with chroma, the abstraction of elements in video through color contrast. In a 1993 interview for Canal 22 Sergio commented:

Well then, I got hooked on video when I discovered the effect of chroma. Because previously all my training was theatrical . . . I discovered a technological magic that gives me the possibility of doing things I never dreamed of in the theater, right? That not even with mirror effects can be done, that is to go from space to the bottom of the sea . . . it seems to me that video, apart from being a completely different medium from theater, I think it is perfectly adjustable to give that modern awakening to theater, this need it has to continue surprising.⁶

II. Dreaming Snakes

Sergio was an exceptional artist. His friend Adriana Diaz Enciso remembers him as “combative and transgressive and at the same time tender and innocent.”⁷ This internal complexity is reflected in his work—particularly his use of vivid, saturated images to depict modern fantasies and primitive fears. His work is a perfect example of what philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman defines as protest manifested in cinema—a relationship established between apparently contradictory concepts.⁸

In 1991 he founded Coitus Interruptus, audiovisual production company, inviting his partner Raúl Zúñiga and his Catalan friend Ñako Nadal as actors, the producers Joaquín Arce and Carlos Uria, and the musician Víctor Bombí to join the company. With them he produced his two best-known video pieces: Serpent’s Dream (1991) and Lokophonia (1991).

In Serpent’s Dream, a divine priestess played by Jack “The Incredible Orlando” Birkett—a British actor known for his work with Derek Jarman and for being completely blind—throws tarot cards at an anonymous man, predicting the latter’s actions and revealing his concerns.⁹ The first card is The Juggler, which captures dreams from other arcana to make them come true, followed by The Chariot, which symbolizes controlling one’s mind instead of succumbing to animal passion. In the scenes that follow, the protagonist walks through a two-dimensional city of digital layers superimposed onto cardboard drawings made by Sergio of stairs, balconies, and cliffs. Here, as in his first use of the labyrinth structure, the relationship of Sergio’s theater practice to the angular and dark motifs of German Expressionism are visible. The appearance of a Sword card tragically signals the death of a messenger, a Filito played by Ñako.¹⁰ The weapon falls into the hands of our hero, played by Raúl, who resolves to use it to commit suicide. We finally discover that everything has happened inside the mind of a cosmic serpent.

It is said that dreaming of snakes is an omen of challenges to come. Here I wonder what it means for the snake to dream of you, to exist as a visual atom. In Serpent’s Dream, Sergio chooses an open ending into transcendence. Although the hero dies, it is suggested that he may have died only as an image in the mind of the pre-Hispanic god. The man has yet to discover the great challenge that awaits him.

In Lokophonia, HIV appears in one of the few pieces produced in first person and in real time during and about the early years of the AIDS crisis in Mexico. This surreal work functions as a metaphor for both AIDS panic and survivor’s guilt. Here, another unidentified man played by Raúl plays a tape consisting of the sound of wailing, which takes him into a hallucinatory state. Each time he presses play, a laughing ghoul chases him into a new scenario. As if in a made-for-TV Carnival Of Souls, he passes by a beach and a fair set against digital skies.¹¹ At the urinals in a public restroom, one of the ghouls gropes him and he becomes cursed with a virus transmitted during cruising. Again the image of a labyrinth reappears: he is cornered and his earthly body is killed. However, unlike in Serpent’s Dream, this time the story does not end with the man’s passage to a non-material plane. Instead, the character played by Raúl, who lives with HIV in real life, is bathed by the ghost of Ñako with a paint that erases him by mixing him with the background—an additional death in the form of oblivion.

Lokophonia responds bluntly to the omen of Serpent’s Dream. The spread of HIV in the real world has reached the anonymous men of the film worlds, as well as Sergio and Raúl themselves, adding a terrible weight to filmic time. Digital resources such as green screen, collage, and monochrome, once used playfully, now seem more deliberate and specific to each scene. In this work the end is even more tragic than in his previous one: our hero does not face a mystical or religious ascension, but rather an absolute end that foretells memory as a challenge that precedes death.

In 1992, Lokophonia was screened as part of the video program Siglo XXIX at the Museo Carrillo Gil and in the Second Biennial of Video Art held at the Cineteca Nacional. Both events were significant in terms of their recognition of the national art scene’s incipient audiovisual guild and the active participation of an artist living with HIV. Sergio’s piece did not win the competition, but it attracted a lot of attention. Ximena Cuevas remembers:

A lot of documentaries, a lot of boring things, fictions with the language of cinema made in small format . . . What struck me the most was the work of Sergio Hernandez, the video with the dimensionality of collage. Sergio, who died of AIDS, kept the intimacy, the fear of the loss of the body sheltered by a baroque language of layers and layers of collage, pure magic . . .¹²

III. The Sorrowful Virgin

Unlike in the many cases in which people with HIV were rejected by their families and dependent on their friends for care, Sergio received the support of his family—especially his mother, Mari Tere, who always accepted her youngest son’s sexuality and creative restlessness. When Sergio began to struggle with the effects of HIV, his parents rented a house in Cuernavaca so that he could rest. The property had a small pool that could only be entered completely naked, per Sergio’s strict instructions—a bodily invitation because the actor is a body, in every possible sense. As all his friends were theater people, they accepted without protest. During a visit, his mom did not have a hard time adapting to this rule, as she was very similar to Sergio, but it took his father a little longer. Touchingly, he eventually agreed to it.

The virus quickly affected Sergio’s image, and he decided to hide from his friends, including Rita, and spend the rest of his time in the care of his parents. He died and was cremated in April 1995. Two ceremonies were held in his honor, an official memorial at the prestigious Gayoso Funeral Home and a drunken binge organized by his many theater and video friends. In keeping with his dramatic, mystical, and comic style, he did one last act of illusionism, as actress Ùrsula Pruneda recalls:

They call[ed] me and we went to the funeral . . . Well, in the room of our apartment we had four images of the Vírgen Dolorosa, arranged like an Andy Warhol repetition. When we came back from the funeral one of the images was lying on the bed—there was no way it was going to fall down like that! It was his way of expressing himself and saying that he was with us.¹³

IV. The Immortality of the Vampire

Nearly thirty years after Sergio’s death, his impact on the rock en tu idioma movement, the founding of a Mexican video school, and on theatrical experimentation is significant.¹⁴ The loss in terms of the work he might have made is incalculable. At the time of his death Sergio was awarded the Young Creators Grant for a project based on Mexican legends, which, like other pieces, he was unable to complete. A couple of years later, Sergio’s boyfriend and collaborator in his most important pieces, Raúl, passed away.

Although his career was cut short, Sergio crossed the border of oblivion that worried him so much by appearing in the works of his friends. In 1996 Santa Sabina released Babel, the band’s third studio album, which they dedicated to him. In her memoir, Rita recalls:

In the year 1995 we had a strong loss, as you know there are many people around the band, that although they don’t appear on stage their work is very important . . . Sergio Hernandez, he worked in the videos that we projected in concerts. Unfortunately he passed away that year and that’s why we dedicated “Babel” to his memory. He was like an angel, he was a charming, intelligent, sensitive and very funny person. And his death was very painful for me and for others. He still appears in my dreams . . .¹⁵

Eduardo Vázquez Martín wrote to Sergio in his book Naturaleza y Hechos (1999):

How the way you move is different now
and the desirous lips you left behind
do not reach you in your dreams,
death has put in your mouth
words that St. John gave to the Bride:
“Let us rejoice,” he says.
“Let us rejoice, Beloved,
let us go deeper into the thicket.”¹⁶

Before his death, Sergio met for Indian food with his friend, writer Adriana Diaz, who was working on her vampire novel La Sed (2001). Incidentally, he questioned her about the concept of vampire immortality and what effect it would have on someone like him. Unfortunately he did not get to read the novel with the answer that would be published years later. In it a vampire turns to an AIDS patient lying in his hospital bed, drains the virulent blood and replaces it with her own, pausing death forever. She makes him a promise that I now make on behalf of our community, Dear Sergio:

You do well to have hope, because you are not going to die. Believe in me: you are immortal.¹⁷

About the author

Jorge Bordello is a visual artist living with HIV. His research focuses on the wrinkles between document and fiction, the domestic archive and the national narrative, the montage of public life. Selected by the National System of Photo Libraries to participate in the Photoessay program (2012) and by the Center for the Image to participate in the Photographic Production Seminar (2016). He has been a beneficiary of the Cultural Promotion and Co-investment programs (FONCA 2011), Young Creators Grant (FONCA 2016), and the Support Program for Municipal and Community Cultures (PACMyC 2015). Winner of the Jury Prize at the Mexico City International Documentary Film Festival (DOCSMX) and the Tlaxcala State Prize for Visual Arts in 2023. His experimental work has been exhibited at venues such as the New Museum (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), MACBA (Barcelona), the Museum of Modern Art (Cuenca), and the Jumex Museum (Mexico City). His research on the local countryside and expressions of identity have been selected for the 19th Rufino Tamayo National Painting Biennial and the 15th FEMSA Biennial. He is a Visual AIDS Artist Member and a founding member of CEPA, a support and artistic expression network for people living with HIV in Tlaxcala.

Writing from the 2024 Research Fellowship is edited by Sophia Larigakis.