Miguel Braceli transforms his studio into a queer nightclub with Studio 66, presenting a performative sculpture activated by gogos and pole dancers that reclaims symbols through dance and celebration. This performance is the closing event of Miguel Braceli’s exhibition Futuro Imperfecto, presented by the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and The Hulett Collection.

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The project converts the eagle-topped flagpole—an emblem of state power and nationalist iconography—into a site of queer celebration and resistance. A male gogo dancer performs inverted around a flagpole crowned by an eagle whose beak is driven into a pink circular platform. His movements, simultaneously combative and erotic, recall gestures of hunting and burial, repurposing militaristic choreography into a queer vernacular of joy, desire, and communal defiance. Confetti, scattered bills, and an engaged audience turn an atmosphere of domination into one of revelry and collective affirmation.

 

Drawing on Braceli’s recent sculptural investigations, the work literalizes tensions between authority and embodiment. Bent and pinned flagpoles—eagles nosediving, poles looped into bows—render symbols of power unstable and pliant. The flagpole is recontextualized: its warlike prestige queered, its gesture redirected toward erotic performance and pedagogies of care. The pink platform functions as both stage and wound—a surface that receives and returns force—while the dancer’s inverted posture reframes domination as a ritual of resilience.
 

Beyond spectacle, the piece proposes emancipatory social forms. It imagines gatherings as pedagogical sites where dance, communal practice, and pleasure become tools for remaking collective life; redefining nation, territory, and belonging through shared movement. By converting state-power iconography into queer signifiers, the work offers a visual and bodily strategy for undermining supremacy: not by erasing history, but by rerouting its images through joy, solidarity, and communal imagination.