Censorship Universal Language Organization

"I’ve been writing a lot during recent years. Essays and thoughts about different topics, like sex, cinema, porn, food. I researched about genitalia and how the censorship institutions operate in some countries. For example, in the U.S. film market, oral sex to women is considered porn, but blow jobs to men are not. In Japan, they blur vaginas or penises, but not anuses.

This made me think that if you cover something with the purpose of not showing it, you’re redrawing it into a new language and not really covering anything. 

To me, the policy of censorship institutions fails. As if faces, gestures and sounds didn’t count when it comes to 'pervert a mind'. So I came up with the idea of an extreme organization that covers every single thing, but at the same time, rebuilds the image in a new language. But such organization would not do the job so well. And that's why the organization has a dubious name: Censorship Universal Language Organization and its acronym C.U.L.O. ('butt', 'asshole', 'anus'... in Spanish).

My creative process combines my skills – graphic design, simple prints and veejaying  – in the form of a vintage fake 'propaganda organization'. This combination allows me to share my work via different outlets – a party, event or exhibition – and I can also sell the prints for really small prices. So it works among the popular audiences, not just within the art world. To me, it’s essential that audiences are able to relate to an art piece from their own life experience.

My references come from my everyday life: the supermarket, the TV, the street. I love vintage design from all eras and porn magazines from the 60s or 70s. For the C.U.L.O. prints, I really tried to picture the office space back in the 60s. I chose to use my printer with only one color in order to spread C.U.L.O.'s statement faster. But I also knew C.U.L.O. needed to be distinguished and noticed everywhere, so I made my pick on fluorescent paper. 

For this work, I used a magazine from Copenhagen called Blue Top Sex 1, which I first found online, scanned in high res. I had the urge to see it in a physical form, but these types of magazine were so anonymous that even the porn research sites didn’t have the information on the actors or actresses from that era. So I kept googling for months. This work has been probably my most 'online' piece in terms of research.

When I already was into the production of the video, the audio and the prints, it was time to compare them with the real thing, examine the actual magazines, read different censorship texts and research the print processes from that period. And finally, through a friend, I found the printed version of Blue Top Sex in Berlin.

I love the artists that work with this kind of historical research on design and its codes, like I do with porn, sex or food, among other themes. I like artists such as Peet Pienaar, a designer from Cape Town that does a lot of research on past eras and mixtures them together for his work.  Or Dr. Alderete, an Argentinean illustrator based in Mexico that uses systems and codes that work out fine today and could have worked the same way 50 years ago."

Federico Lamas in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (October 2013)