Placed by lightning, Modesto CA May 16th

Will You Love Me In December As You Do in May?

Have you ever traveled to Dreamstate, California - Highway for Lovers? A land kissed by green and blush, where Deme and Quique, queer artists, storytellers, and partners, reconnect with Quique’s home state. Though based in New York, they made their way back to California, paying homage to both the land of beauty and their love. In this exploration, they invite us to witness the fluidity of identity, connection, and emotion, captured through color, movement, and aesthetic. Their work is an embodiment of love in motion, where each gesture, each hue, and every movement speaks to the intricate ties between place, self, and the ever-evolving story they tell together.

PHOTOGRAPHY DEMETRIS CHARALAMBOUS @detherealc AND QUIQUE @le_quique
TEXT MAYA BIGIRIMANA @mayasarahhh IN COLLABORATION WITH DEMETRIS CHARALAMBOUS @detherealc AND QUIQUE @le_quique

Deme and Quique, creative storytellers and partners based in New York City, have explored love in its many forms. Their work merges movement, sound, visual art, and design to craft immersive performances that are as personal as they are universal. Weaving their own histories, identities, and family into their art, they create spaces that demand their audience’s presence. Deme, a Genderqueer artist, dancer and choreographer from Cyprus, incorporates the surreal, mythical and absurd into each piece they create, assembling blueprints of new worlds for them to live in. Quique, a Queer Mexican-American sound designer and visual artist, shares a deep connection to sound as a means of storytelling. Their compositions often involve intricate, self-crafted pieces for performance works, showcasing the care and intimacy embedded in their art. Together, their projects honor heritage, family, and identity while crafting meaningful narratives. Whether highlighting their individual talents or showcasing them as a duo, their work stands as a testament to the power of storytelling and queer love.

[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

    • The Cruisers, Modesto, CA, May 21st

    Earlier this month, Deme and Quique ventured out of the city to California, documenting and journaling their travels, inspired by the natural beauty of the land. As they returned to this familiar terrain, they carried their creative partnership—movement, sound, and visual art—with them, letting the land shape and influence their work, while capturing the essence of the place that has long informed Enrique’s expression. An homage to California, and love.

    A bodied river. Sleep embodied dead float down a body like it. River, if I am also physical, is that the picture. Do we really find it scary. Maybe sleep is all the body wants. Maybe I’m too quick to admit it. - by Quique Yosemite, CA, 2025

    Quique’s Journal Entry: 

    On our way back from Taft point the sun had fallen and my flashlight kept dying. At one point the flashlight turned back on to reveal a group of deer. It looked like we stumbled upon a secret. They minded their business as we walked past them, not scurrying away or fleeing. Their calmness amongst us made me feel included in their secret, almost as if we too were innocent. 

    “Will you love me in December as you do in May?”  -Jack Kerouac

      Drink, Big Sur, CA, May 18th

      .

      Deme

      All my life I’ve been island hopping. I was born and raised in Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean Levant. grew up on the fringes of Nicosia, which is the last divided capital city in the world. In it there is a buffer zone – also known as the "Green Line” – which is a demilitarized no man's land that cuts straight through Nicosia's heart and across the whole island. This makes my home a very complicated place to be from culturally, socially, linguistically and politically. I moved to the city of islands, New York when I was nineteen.  As an artist, my current favorite materials to work with are light and the body. Maybe it’s because the sun in Cyprus feels closer than anywhere else on Earth and I spent my summers growing up with a dry burning. I used to wish I could take the sun in my mouth and drown it out with saliva like a lozenge. I wanted that fiery cool breath.

      Maybe that’s why everything feels the way it does. A tempest, a shipwreck, a beach party. Maybe that’s why I make art: so I can find an island in my heart where I can make sense of everything. 

      Quique has become one of my sanctuary islands in New York. I fell for and in love with them after hearing them read out of their notebook - so you’re in for a treat.

        • Home Relationship, Cachagua, CA, May 20tn

        "Our collaboration mirrors our lovemaking; it demands a delicate balance of compromise and shared passion, a necessary fusion of perspectives. It's about understanding each other's viewpoints, reaching agreements, and embracing disagreements, all while granting each other intimate access to our minds. Quique once told me that being in a deep relationship with someone is like holding up a mirror for them. You see one another under the most terrible yet glorious light." - Deme

          I love you, Yosemite, CA, May 17th

          .

          Quique

           I am in love, a sound artist, photographer, LBC latina, cellist, hedonist, and probably above all else a California Girl. My sisters are my best friends and I'm terrified of how beautiful the world is, how much is always under threat. 

          Beauty is everything to me, I want to be it, I want to kiss it, and most importantly never be blind to it so I can notice it's everywhere and continuously lessen my distance from it - I want pocketfuls of beauty on me at all times - I dont want to waste any more time.

          I’m as much of a romantic as nature is a realist; I believe the body can be drank from wherever (the belly, the neck, the hole especially the hole) because ever has nothing to do with it. Here I ask the most from ever and in exchange, eventually, I’ll hand over to ever my body and do so without bitterness (I love this place; I’ll probably be a little bitter) My partner Demetris is an entire ever I get the privilege to witness and exist with. They dont doubt the reality of their imagination and as a result contain the capacity to show me how to physicalize the most intangible of dreams. That is what it feels like to be with them: to have the ability to constantly create the floor we take our next steps on.

          A lot of the time collaborative art making evades language and requires an intuitive understanding of each other's perspectives. We invited Deme and Quique to reflect on questions they might have for eachother, ones that they never really addressed yet they suspect to have an innate unspoken agreement about. Questions whose answers may be buried under the casualness of their intimacy:

          Quique asks Deme: In our work we are always mentioning cores. Hearing you mention cores on our first piece together instantly made my heart hard. How do you think a core makes the cut in your work? As opposed to other essential elements in the work that aren't considered as such.  What is a core that you might always include in your work? 

          When I think about cores I’m really thinking about a unit of reproduction, something that carries the potential of life inside it. It feels like whatever reveals itself as a core in the work is something that has primal matter within it, a soup of feelings, thoughts and ideas that are the building blocks for a new world. A collection of cores I’ve been working with more recently has been the color red, mirrors, islands, deepthroating, and kettles (?) and pleasure. 

          I currently have two duffle bags tucked in my closet with the costumes, props and notebooks of our two most recent works Late Matter and Glieser. I like to think of those duffle bags as some afterlife-esque terrariums where the cores of those works are being preserved and ready to burst out of the seams and bloom once their time comes again. 

          So in many ways what makes a core for me is something that has a potential for revisitation: a feeling, an object, a memory, an image, a sound, a person. In her book the Argonauts, Maggie Nelson says that “such revisitations constitute a lifetime” and really that’s what a core is all about for me. The themes are always the same and they are so potent that you can’t help but try to find different angles and meanings for them. You’re also core in that sense. Our relationship is a core I need to keep experiencing and revisiting. You bring so much potency and inspiration in my life and in my/our work. I love hearing you talk about the things you love. You collect cores and crystallize them through your brilliance. I couldn’t be more lucky. 

            Quique asks Deme: I desire you, desire to please you and you are one of the most desiring people I know. How does desire and pleasure play a role in the work we have been recently creating?

            Our recent work has been circling around the theme of Desire and how it motivates human behavior. When we started shooting this project we had an unspoken understanding of how we wanted to activate our bodies within the vast landscape of California. Our deep need to understand what a body that desires liberation can be, especially at a time where there is so much censorship and oppression in the world, lead to this photo series where we are situating our shared love for the nude body in the context of its origin. We’re thinking about refugia — areas where populations of species, or communities, can persist during times of environmental change or stress and create safe havens for the body. At the crux of this war against the body is pleasure and specifically Queer pleasure. We wield pleasure as a blade, as hope and as resistance towards the world we live in. We imagine the body in pleasure as a ritual that transcends geographical, corporeal and conceptual borders. This work aims to craft a personal cosmology as a forcefield against harm – as a way to immortalize the history of a body that is under a constant threat of extinction.

            Red, winged. , Yosemite, CA, May 17th

            .

            Oregon Poem.

            You have never 

            seen such green, where never

            has you by the green this windy drive; 

            never loves you loves you good and green,

            as if he called in sick to with you more. 

            There are mountains too. And what they are is

            watching, choosing, nowing you. 

            “California cock in mind on mouth in cars burned house. 

            This is a bruising couplet of clouds in a leaving California sky. 

            Let sky not be dramatic.

            Turn it all to corners. 

            You could die. We do this.”

            - by Quique

              Deme asks Quique: How do you think our work differed before we met each other and how do you think it has synthesized ever since? 

              I was almost always making work on my own before I met you, so I think in general my work before felt more isolated. I wouldn't say it was isolating, I still felt I was using something very specific about my experiences in order to connect with something much larger - the everything in everything. I was obsessed with armpits, Highways (1 and i5), cruising, being completely alone then suddenly in the company of the most intimate stranger or friend. I abided by my field recordings, my connection to and my honoring of my Latine Heritage (which in the states has always and especially now meant resistance). I’d spend my summers looking and loving, searching for Little Californias everywhere and trying to stay as long as I could in those magnificently real pockets of green, or dried goldened grass, or asphalt gas station parking lots wafting through the area the scent of Pastor and the sounds of families stopping for a meal - id take in these pockets, collecting as much life as possible in my devices: notebook, field recorder, body. 

              My grandpa was my first muse; in the summer we’d sit together, listening to Oregon’s KQAC ALL CLASSICAL RADIO on the porch of the house he raised my mother in. He passed right before I met you, and the last summer we spent together I tried to gather as much as I could from him. He never minded my prying; he was the Leo. He’d point down the street to the porch where he and his twin brother would hang out 70 years before and begin telling a story, letting any tears that came roll down his face. He was the first man to show me it was okay to be affected by things in such a way. It’s like he would tear up whenever life made him proud to be alive.

              I’d begin my work late at night, alone. I’d pull from all of this and turn on camcorder footage I’d take of these highways or forests or family and make short films from them, or I’d collage sentences I had sporadically written down in the moment and continue writing from there. It was a very isolating experience but what I could accomplish by myself was empowering, and probably the reason I could trust myself enough with the responsibility of scoring your work with my sound. 

              After having met you, the same life still inspires me, the list has grown of course, I draw from what you bring as much if not more than any forest i’ve ever visited, but none of my interests and passions have left the drawing board. What has changed is how they are brought to life. You’ve helped me physicalize my art in a way I never before imagined. It’s like you can 3D everything. I remember the first time I designed sound for you. We had just started hooking up again and I had the biggest crush on you. You had rehearsed a couple times already with a few of our collaborators and had a residency to attend. The show was the week you returned. You left me with a couple 3 minute videos of rehearsal and said “Ill be back in two weeks to hear what you’ve made.” I had just finished a project doing sound for my first big venue, PSNY, but making sound for someone you’re falling in love with is both the easiest and hardest venture. I wanted you, and in the work tried to show you what I could offer you, what we could offer each to each other. I fell in love with the movement you had created. I’d never seen bodies move like that - movement as warm as it was intentional, limbs curving like blades of grass then slicing through the air with the sturdyness of metal. Nothing harsh yet everything unbreakable. I made each sound as if you could hear it the second it was created. I liked how eager I was to create for you, maybe because i knew that because of who you were it was for me too, for everyone, for the same things I wanted to be for. 

              I hadnt slept in 24 hours when you came over to listen to what I had made. After editing and listening over and over the sound wasn’t even legible to me; it didnt matter -  your expression was obvious; you shot up from the chair and squeezed me, kissed me, and told me what I had made was beautiful. You watched the videos alongside the sound and in your eyes I could see your vision being cemented and more importantly, you enjoying that image. I’ll never forget that feeling of impressing you, of building something together. I will always chase that feeling. You will always give me realities I aspire to cement and build upon. Gifts after gifts after gifts. That is what has ultimately changed about my work since I’ve met you; now, it will always be ours.

              • First Encounter, San Francisco, CA