Still from Street Signs: Murals in Chicago 1988-1991, featuring mural “Tilt (Together Protect the Community) at the intersections of Fullerton and Washtenaw, Chicago, IL., by Damon Lamar Reed, Kristal Pacheco, John Pitman Weber. More info about this mural at Chicago Public Art Group.
Date/Time: Sunday, December 15, 2024 from 2 pm to 3:30 pm
Location: Chicago Art Department, 1926 S Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60608
Sin Cinta Previa will premiere the short documentary film Street Signs: Murals in Chicago. Shot during 1988-1991, the film captures the powerful awareness of history and community identity evident in public murals of the era. Many of the murals have been lost to gentrification. Still, they are remembered by countless Latinx community members who lived in the city during those years. Street Signs includes murals in the neighborhoods of Humboldt Park, Little Village, Logan Square, and Pilsen from the 1980s to 1990s. This unfinished film by Susan Dobinsky and Julia Kurtz was also supported by filmmakers Ronn Bayly and Susan Regele’s then Chicago-based company Lightbound, active from 1980-1990.
The film features interviews with muralists Sandra Antongiorgi and Jose Guerrero, Dr. Olga Nuño and photographer Ivan Justiniano with narration by Ilya Adler. The filmmakers, and a very special guest, Sandra Antongiorgi, an accomplished Chicago-based muralist and musician in her own right, will discuss their roles and contributions to the making of the film. Our guests will also share their insights into this rare glimpse of Chicago’s Latinx community and mural art history. And, we’ll find out just how their remarkable film ended up unfinished and unseen until now.
The unfinished film canisters sat in Dobinsky’s attic until she donated sections of the unfinished project to the Chicago Film Archive. Fast forward to the summer of 2023, when Jose Luis Benavides, a Chicago (born-and-raised) experimental filmmaker, used some b-roll from their documentary project in a commissioned work for the Chicago Film Archives’ annual Media Mixer fundraiser. Benavides was thrilled to find clips of the communities he grew up in captured on film.
At the Media Mixer, Dobinsky presented herself to Benavides, and their friendship began. She invited him to her home, and shared her archives of the unfinished film, “Street Signs: Murals in Chicago”. Benavides, curator, and founder of Sin Cinta Previa, a Latinx video art screening series and web-based platform, has since been investigating this unfinished film project’s archive of images, transcripts, and logs. Subsequently, he has curated the upcoming public screening and discussion. Benavides presented some of these materials at the Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice at Begonia Labs, a project space affiliated with Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN) in early 2024.
Benavides states, “These films are a true treasure, showcasing some still present, and some lost, Chicago murals by and in Chicanx and Boricua neighborhoods of Humboldt Park, Little Village, Logan Square, and Pilsen. Dobinsky and Lurtz’s film is a real time capsule, it will transport audiences back in time and inspire future generations.”
Recently awarded a grant from Hyde Park Art Center’s Artists Run Chicago Fund in partnership with Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art to host this screening event, Benavides applied to the grant with the following statement; “Murals on Film centers two Chicago women filmmakers’ documentation of Chicago’s Latinx mural artists through an exploration of intersectional identities.”
Centering community narratives and memories of these murals, and the cultural practices of Mexican, and Latin American popular mural art practices, we can better understand these murals’ importance as an American art form with broad roots in the Americas on a hemispheric level. This presentation of Chicago, Chicano, and Puerto Rican mural histories will recenter Latinx artistic contributions to public art and design in Chicago neighborhoods, often found at the center of problematic urban renewal projects, predatory real estate investments, and unchecked gentrification.
Benavides adds, “Centering these murals with a community-focused recollection of their significance and meanings, celebrating the artists who made them, and remembering their themes and icons, may help recall and redress the continued erasure and forced relocation of our Latinx communities still being pushed out of these neighborhoods due to historical and present-day gentrification while emphasizing our roots here, establishing the artistic, architecture, cultural, economic, and visual identities of Latinx communities in Chicago.”
Join us for a film screening, panel discussion, and intercultural and intergenerational dialogue as we seek community members to share their memories, experiences, and connections to these murals, as muralists, and the public who live/d beside these murals, for decades.
About the program:
Street Signs: Murals in Chicago. (29 min.) Susan Dobinsky and Julia Kurtz, 1988-1991. Feature interviews with muralists Sandra Antongiorgi and Jose Guerrero, Dr. Olga Nuño, and photographer Ivan Justiniano with narration by Ilya Adler.
Additional early cuts of Street Signs. Street Signs: Murals in Chicago (2 min., & 6 min.), with narration by Ilya Adler, Isabel De Sio, and Joaquin Perez.
Total run time: 37 min.
This program and the following discussion will be moderated by Sin Cinta Previa founder and curator, Jose Luis Benavides.
Still from Street Signs: Murals in Chicago 1988-1991. Featuring the muralist, Sandra Antongiorgi.
About the artist:
Launching a visual arts career in Chicago at the age of 15, Sandra Antongiorgi had the rare opportunity to study under renowned muralists and artists, including Keith Haring. Known primarily for her gifted use of paint, and formation of concept, Antongiorgi has contributed to scores of murals that dot the Chicago cityscape. Her work has been showcased in several museums and exhibitions, including The National Museum of Mexican Art, Zhou B Gallery, and most recently a solo exhibit at Advocate & Gochis Galleries in Los Angeles, and the Center on Halsted Gallery.
Antongiorgi has led and collaborated on many murals including, Weaving Cultures, which won the Chicago Readers, “Best Mural of 2017”. The mural is unique in that it features a transgender Latina, serves to bridge the gap between divided neighborhoods, and honors underrepresented women of color. One of her more recent mural collaborations, “The Love I Vibrate” is an inaugural mural honoring our non-binary community members. In 2018 “Es Tiempo de Recordar” a longstanding iconic mural in Chicago, also a collaboration, was whitewashed by the City, immediately launching Antongiorgi into advocacy for the anti-erasure of murals, and pushing for a permanent public mural registry that would preserve and protect cultural murals in the City of Chicago. Subsequently, a registry is being established to catalog and commemorate outdoor murals across the City of Chicago, and prevent complete removal or destruction.
As a studio artist, Antongiorgi draws upon life experiences, power relationships, culture, boundaries, mysticism, and spirituality. She explores how social stigmatization is internalized, inhibiting the ability to see one’s abundant beauty, and uses human biology to reveal the inherent splendor within every one of us. Antongiorgi is dedicated to recognizing and responding to suffering. Her works expose the damage caused by family violence, incarceration, and systematic marginalization. Antongiorgi’s work delves deeply into those struggles normally hidden from view. She invites us to see where many turn a blind eye. More info at santongiorgi.com Instagram: @santongiorgi
About the Venue:
Chicago Art Department (CAD) is an artist-run, BIPOC-led nonprofit with a mission to provide space and resources for civically-minded artists to grow their practice while questioning the city we live in. CAD provides equitable and accessible opportunities for artistic development through subsidized Studio Residencies, Collective Learning Cohorts, and contemporary Exhibitions and Programs rooted in justice. For 20 years CAD has advanced creative Chicago voices that otherwise might not be heard. Collectively founded in 2004 and located in Pilsen since 2005, CAD’s physical space features 11,000 square feet comprising two public galleries, private studio space for up to 20 artists, and community event areas. Since starting the Studio Residency Program in 2012, CAD has worked with over 100 Resident artists, and through partnerships and exhibitions, has exhibited works by over 1,000 artists. CAD aims to be a collective of diverse communities tied to each Resident artist and public program, creating a rich tapestry of community and culture working toward civic change. More info at chicagoartdepartment.org Instagram: @chicagoartdepartment
About the Sponsor:
Chicago Film Archives is a regional film archive dedicated to identifying, collecting, preserving and providing access to films that represent the Midwest. Our purpose is to serve institutions and filmmakers of this region and elsewhere by establishing a repository for institutional and private film collections; serve a variety of cultural, academic, and artistic communities by making the films available locally, nationally, and internationally for exhibition, research, and production; and serve our culture by restoring and preserving films that are rare or not in existence elsewhere. More info at chicagofilmarchives.org Instagram: @chicagofilmarchives
About the Funders:
This program is supported by Hyde Park Art Center’s Artists Run Chicago Fund in partnership with Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.
Art Design Chicago is a special citywide collaboration and series of events and exhibitions highlighting the city’s unique artistic heritage and creative communities. An initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art in partnership with artists and arts organizations across the city, Art Design Chicago seeks to expand narratives of American art with an emphasis on the city’s diverse and vibrant creative cultures and the stories they tell. artdesignchicago.org Instagram: @artdesignchicago
There Are New Suns: Dal Niente + Ana García Jácome & Ariella Granados
“We have to recognize that a multitude of realities have, do, and will exist” ~ adrienne maree brown
There are new suns is a co-curated program of interdisciplinary and experimental performance works highlighting the edges of access, disability, and race. This is the third shared program between Dal Niente and other Chicago artists.
This program is curated by Alejandro Acierto and Jose Luis Benavides, and features works by Yun Lee, Jay Afrisando, Ana Garcia Jácome, Carolyn Chen, and Ariella Granados, with performances by Ariella Granados and Dal Niente members Alejandro Acierto, Zachary Good, and Mabel Kwan.
The program opens with Yun Lee’s Space C, a poetic gesture that relies on audio descriptions of a site inaccessible to the audience. Creating an imagined “third space”, Lee’s audio descriptive conventions articulate an audio environment similar to the performance venue yet not quite the same, blurring the sites of performance that are both unavailable to the audience and ever-present in its live performance. Working directly with audio captions as a central component of his work, Jay Afrisando’s videos from his [SOUNDSCAPTION] series invite viewers to imagine sounds as they are displayed in text on the screen. Based on phone footage from 2016-2020 and made at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, his videos respond to the prevalence of audio captioning used in Zoom calls (and now TikTok videos) that became a pivotal point of access for those communicating online in languages that were not native to them.
In her video essay, Malitas: women, disability and medical violence, Ana García Jácome moves us to reconsider histories of disability in Mexico that asserts a focused politic around the systems of access and how race and gender become impacted by those negotiations. Conversely, Carolyn Chen’s adagio features performers exuding complex facial expressions as they respond to an in-ear recording barely audible to the audience. A piece that translates feeling through the performing body, it gestures towards the transcendence of sound as a medium. Lastly, Ariella Granados performs a not-yet-titled improvisational work that recalls their first encounters with language and access to highlight distinct moments of their immigrant family’s experiences with language barriers.
There are new suns thus poetically and creatively describes multiple conditions of disability to speculate alternative relationships to sound, image, and language. Or, as Octavia Butler writes, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
Sin Cinta Previa founder and curator, published Here Comes the Hurricane, an interview and academic feature on the spectacular work of Jesús Hilario-Reyes in the 2024 issue of Media-N: Journal of New Media Caucus. Guest edited by Ace Lehner (University of Vermont) and Chelsea Thompto (Virginia Tech) this special issue of Media-N titled Trans New Media as Embodied Practice asks: How do trans artists engage generatively with new media? In what ways does lived trans experience inform artistic practices? How do trans new media practices diverge and intersect with queer practices? The articles, artist projects, interview, and review in this issue engage with the political and embodied experience of making and engaging with new media as a trans person.
Palabras Dulces Palabras Amargas is a 43-minute-long experimental documentary that uses poetry, music, and theater to share the bitter-sweet experiences of, queer, questioning, lesbian, and bisexual Latina women in Chicago.
Released in 2009, this film was made in partnership with La Dulce Palabra Spoken Word Ensemble, a multicultural, multigenerational spoken-word ensemble that originated as a collaboration between the organization Amigas Latinas and En Las Tablas Performing Arts Group. Featuring six original works performed by Alicia Tellez Vega, Martha Cartagena, Maritiza Nazario, Zoraida Ortiz, Evon Flores Barrera, Milka Ramirez, Marixa Rojas, and Maria Del Carmen Calderon. This film shares stories of urban life, intergenerational connections, poetry of the people, how to grow older with a bang, sexuality empowerment, and domestic violence.
Woven into its poetic form are formal interviews with founders of the Amigas Latinas, a nationally recognized GLBTQQ organization whose mission was to empower Latina lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning women by providing a safe environment, personal growth, support, education, and advocacy to impact family, friends and the larger communities we live in. Founded in 1995, Amigas Latinas’ vision was to celebrate women and queer Latinas. Much like the film, Amigas Latinas bolsters pride, and acceptance in its community, calling queer Latina women to live boldly, without boundaries or limitations, fearlessly and unapologetically.
Palabras Dulces, Palabras Amargas (43 min, 2009)
Sun., Aug. 13, 2023
2-4 PM CST
Chicago Art Department
1926 S Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60608
Video screening and discussion with directors Linda Garcia Merchant and Maritza Nazario, moderated by Jose Luis Benavides and Amanda Cervantes as part of their art exhibition Amigas Latinas Forever (Aug. 11, 2023 to Sept. 30, 2023 at Chicago Art Department with the generous support of an Ignite Fund/3Arts grant)
Maritza Nazario was born in in Puerto Rico, she holds a B.A. in theater from the University of Puerto Rico, and an M.A. in theater from the University of Illinois. She has extensive experience as a playwright, poet, actress and theatrical director. Nazario is the executive director of En Las Tablas Performing Arts, a not-for-profit, performing arts community organization, in the Hermosa neighborhood in Chicago co-founded with Milka Ramirez. She has been trailblazing the Latino theater scene at full speed for over 30 years. She also serves on the board of the Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center, an organization that has been dedicated to celebrating Afro-Latinx art for over 45 years. Early on in Maritza’s career, she performed in various productions produced by Latino Chicago Theater Company, the first recorded Latino-centered company in Chicago, where she also began. Since, she has performed throughout the city, and in 2017 was featured in UrbanTheater Company’s production of Ashes of Light as Tia Divina. In 2006, Maritza founded En Las Tablas Performing Arts (ELTPA) furthering her teaching prowess to benefit the Hermosa neighborhood with affordable access to the performing arts.
Linda García Merchant holds a PhD in Chicana/Latina Literary and Cultural Studies and Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. García Merchant is also the co-founder (with Maria Cotera) of the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective at the University of Texas-Austin. García Merchant is a Digital Humanities Consultant on the Afro-Chicanx Digital Humanities Project: Memories, Narratives, and Oppositional Consciousness of Black Diasporas, a cross-institutional and cross-regional comparative research project funded through Crossing Latinidades, an Andrew C. Mellon Foundation initiative. An award-winning documentary filmmaker García Merchant has directed and produced eleven films including Las Mujeres de la Caucus Chicana, Palabras Dulces, Palabras Amargas, Thresholds, and Yo Soy Eva. Her most recent work, the autobiographical short, No Es Facil 2020, will be part of the exhibit, “Two Cultures, One Family: Building Family, Finding Home” which opens September 2022, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
The title for this exhibit stems from a common protest slogan in Spanish, “Quisieron enterrarnos sin saber que eramos semillas / They tried to bury us without knowing we were seeds”. This exhibition broadly explores the theme of “environments” and “the environment” to grapple with the concerns of Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean peoples of different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, and their distinct national identities, languages, and histories. Éramos Semillas explores the legacies of environmental racism, how local and historic racial climates create anti-blackness in Latinx communities, how coloniality compounds natural disasters, and how inhospitable environments for people with disabilities are actively being challenged. The works explored here engage questions of memory and the home as sites of resistance through indigenous practices, affirmations of queerness, femininity, and ancient language practices, alongside contemporary inquiries into moving image, the body, and voice as forms of decolonial praxis. The artists here embody truths. For them, decoloniality is not a metaphor, a theory, or an idea but a constant and uphill battle, a lifelong goal, an attainable and sustainable movement, a process, a way of life, and radical action.
Jose Luis Benavides (Chicago, US, 1986) is a Latinx and queer photographer, moving image maker, and lecturer at Wilbur Wright College, City Colleges of Chicago. Working primarily with a range of personal archives, his work explores issues relating to gender, sexuality, culture, and migration. His experimental documentary film, Lulu en el Jardín, tells the story of his lesbian mother’s coming out in Chicago during the 1970s. His work has screened at Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival, US (2020), and other festivals around the world. As an experimental artist, documentarian, and video art programmer he opens conversations, space and time for diverse perspectives from feminist, queer and Latinx perspectives for the virtual archive SinCintaPrevia.com.
Nubes Art Fair (new-bes, meaning clouds in Spanish) is the parting of clouds into a new realm of infinite possibility. As Heaven Gallery begins its journey of spatial reclamation for the arts in Wicker Park, we wanted to mark this moment with an art fair that exalts Chicago culture and features BIPOC led art galleries and curators from the South, West and North side. Nubes Art Fair is about the residual memory of place and a reconnection to the land where native people have long walked the Milwaukee Avenue trail. This is a return to Chicago’s spiritual energy and to the birthplace of House music, which was once the heartbeat of Wicker Park.
Nubes is a vision for what equity in the arts looks like and a call to dream radically.
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Videos on view at Nubes Art Fair at Heaven Gallery feature a curated selection including a sketch, music video, dreamscape, and a collaborative short with a range of styles mostly in 2D to subtle use if 3D animation. These works were primarily created on paper with one shot from ceramic stills.
Butterfly Ceramic Animation, 2022, 00:19, digital video. This animated sketch was created using six slightly altered images of a butterfly in a field with a cloud moving across the sky. Stills were taken of glazed ceramic, shot and then edited together for this subtle yet beautiful motion sequence.
Alien, 2020, 4:01, digital video. A figure lonesomely traverses several dream-or-real landscapes ending up on another planet. This dreamscape was compiled with acrylic paint, pencil, and crayon on paper; 3D animation.
ConTextos Presents: Teen in the System by Darron Jackson, 2022, 5:01, digital video. This animated memoir was a collaboration with the organization ConTextos and Darron Jackson, created with crayon on paper
Lovers Lane - Apollo the Gemini AMV (animated music video), 2021, 2:09, digital video. An animated music video for Apollo the Gemini’s song “Lovers Lane” (available on Spotify), created with crayon on paper.
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Haylie Jimenez was born in Orlando, FL but spent most of her adolescence in rural north Georgia. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in May 2020. Her work depicts and centers around black and brown queer femmes, either in normal everyday settings based from her own lived experiences, sometimes including mythical, or magical elements to emphasize certain marginalized realities. Her practice consists of drawings, printmaking, and animation. She is interested in drawing as a form of documentation and in the various ways drawing styles are informed and how lived experiences inform style as well as subject matter.
Follow on Instagram: @_h4yli3 - More videos: Vimeo.com/haylie - $upport: Venmo @Haylie-Jimenez
Trans-Parent Material: Oli Rodriguez presented by Sin Cinta Previa is a screening and discussion between video-artists Oli Rodriguez and scholar Francisco Galarte.
Join us for a preview screening of Papi’s Pregnant (~2022, 11 min) and a full screening of LYNDALE (2018, 24 min. Papi’s Pregnant chronicles the filmmakers conception and navigation of getting pregnant as a transmasculine identified person. This feature length film visualizes queerness and a burgeoning medical field of trans pregnancy. Winner of the IC DOCS Jury Award for Best Documentary Short (2019), LYNDALE explores toxic masculinity, cyclical familial trauma and queerness.
July 7, 2022 @ 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
ZOOM DISCUSSION
Join Oli Rodriguez and Francisco Galarte on Zoom. Register here.
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Oli Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, photography, performance, installation, poetry and writing. He is an assistant Professor in the Department of Art at California State University. He is a Diverse Voices in Docs (DVID) fellows for the Kartemquin Films and the Community Film Workshop (2020). He has screened, performed, lectured and exhibited works internationally and nationally. His intersectional research and interdisciplinary projects conceptually focus on queerness, gender, appropriation, performative interactions, visualizing familial and other representations of the AIDS pandemic, while referencing historical movements in gender, racial and feminist histories.
Francisco J. Galarte is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of New Mexico. His first book, Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies explores transgender analytics and Chicana/o Studies failures in understanding racialization, gendered violence, queer sexualities, masculinities and femininities.
Jose Luis Benavides (moderator) is a Latinx and queer video-artist who has screened their work internationally, and most recently at Lit & Luz Festival (2022). As the founder of Sin Cinta Previa, their work was awarded an Art Leaders of Color Network – POWER Project grant (2018), a Propeller Fund grant (2019), and a Hyde Park Arts Center – Artist Run Chicago 2.0 grant (2021).
Sin Cinta Previa: Latin(a)x & Queer Archive Video Series is a screening and discussion series which archives the polyvocal, multi-ethnic and plural gendered experiences, moving images and video-art works of Latinx artists from across the Americas and Caribbean. With a special interest in video artists, experimental filmmakers and documentary makers, Sin Cinta Previa seeks to redress the invisibility and erasure of the historic contributions to political and artistic resistance in video made by queer, trans, non-binary, women, indigenous, Afro-descendant, and diasporic peoples across the region.
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This event is in conjunction with Hyde Park Art Center’s Artist Run Chicago Fund.
Bajo los efectos del poder, a project by Ricardo Miguel Hernández, curated by Yenny Hernández
Bajo los efectos del poder (Under the effects of power), is a research process and curatorial proposal anchored in unveiling, through interdisciplinarity and artistic versatility, the historical and daily tensions that some societies and nations have suffered, victims −and sometimes victimizers, as a result of the attitudes of subjects with authoritarian tendencies− of despotisms, inconsistencies, and dystopias. The references is not precisely aiming to understand the decolonial framework in Cuban society as a detachment from the Eurocentric power that it suffered for years; but in showing in a reflective and suggestive way the result of scrutinizing, touching sensitive areas, questioning the course of a social project stranded in nostalgia, immobility, and arbitrariness: visible and experiential phenomena in today’s Cuban society.
It is an exploratory and curatorial work in the trajectory of Cuban artist Ricardo Miguel Hernández, which is anchored in the exercise of power and control that is still suffered today in contemporary societies, in this case with particular emphasis on the Cuban one, where he travels from the space of privacy, community and society in general. It is a reflection and visualization on the centralization of power, on the despotic control of some with respect to others, evidenced through different postures, operations, and aesthetic supports.
Nada nuevo bajo el sol (Nothing new under the Sun) (2015-2017) is the first occurrence of this project. It consists of a trilogy of audio-visual material. Faces, manners and names have followed one another, but the Sun continues as the eternal metaphor of power. These are shots of Havana sunsets captured from the same point of view. Each video aims to give voice to the image of Louis XIV, of Indians and Egyptians, from the Cuban urban and social visuality; all to verify that nothing is new under the Sun, that history repeats itself over and over again.
This multimedia project entails a combination of archival lobby cards
collaged with photographs, both personal and political in nature
printed (in limited editions) soon-to-be available as take-aways in
select locations in Mexico City, Havana, Chicago, and Nashville. These lobby cards (seen below) are
coupled with a series of three video works entitled Nada nuevo bajo el sol (Nothing New Under the Sun) available to view for a limited time on Sin Cinta Previa’s new Vimeo page here. Viewing the complete Vimeo Showcase requires the password: terremoto
[ES]
Terremoto La Postal presenta: Bajo los efectos del poder, un proyecto de Ricardo Miguel Hernández curado por Yenny Hernández
Bajo los efectos del poder, es una investigación y propuesta curatorial que se ancla en develar a través de la interdisciplinariedad y la versatilidad artística las tensiones históricas y cotidianas que han padecido algunas sociedades y naciones, víctimas –y a veces victimarias producto de las actitudes de sujetos con aires autoritarios– de despotismos, inconsistencias y distopías. Precisamente la referencia no está en el orden de comprender el entramado decolonial en la sociedad cubana en tanto desprendimiento del poder eurocéntrico que por años padeció; sino en mostrar de manera reflexiva y sugerente el resultado de escudriñar, de tocar zonas sensibles, de cuestionar el decursar de un proyecto social varado en la nostalgia, en el inmovilismo y la arbitrariedad: fenómenos visibles y experienciales en la sociedad cubana de hoy.
Se trata de un trabajo exploratorio y curatorial en la trayectoria de Ricardo Miguel Hernández, el cual se ancla en el ejercicio de poder y control que aún hoy se padece en las sociedades contemporáneas, en este caso haciendo énfasis particular en la cubana, donde se transita desde el espacio de la intimidad, de la comunidad y de la sociedad en sentido general. Es una reflexión y visualización sobre la centralización del poder, sobre el control despótico de unos respecto a otros, evidenciado a través de diferentes posturas, operatorias y soportes estéticos.
“Nada nuevo bajo el sol” (2015-2017), es la primera activación de esta muestra, en colaboración con Sin Cinta Previa. Se trata de una trilogía de materiales audiovisuales. Rostros, maneras y nombres se han sucedido, pero el Sol continúa como la eterna metáfora del poder. Son tomas de atardeceres habaneros capturados desde un mismo punto. Cada video se propone dar voz a la imagen de Luis XIV, de indios y de egipcios, desde la visualidad urbana y social; todo para comprobar que nada es nuevo bajo el Sol, que la historia se repite una y otra vez. Disponible en línea desde el 19 de agosto
Este proyecto multimedia contiene una combinación de tarjetas de lobby de archivo con collages de fotografías, tanto personal como política, impresas (en ediciones limitadas) que pronto estarán disponibles para llevar en lugares selectos de la Ciudad de México, Havana, Chicago y Nashville. Estas tarjetas de lobby (que se ven a continuación) se combinan con una serie de tres trabajos de video titulados Nada nuevo bajo el sol (Nada nuevo bajo el sol) disponibles para ver por tiempo limitado en la nueva página de Vimeo de Sin Cinta Previa aquí. Ver el Vimeo Showcase completo requiere la contraseña: terremoto
Ricardo Miguel Hernández studied at the Cátedra Arte de
Conducta created and directed by Tania Bruguera. He has exhibited in
several solo exhibitions in countries like Italy and Cuba. Among his
group exhibitions include those made in Madrid, Social Subjetiva.
PHotoEspaña 2019. Ateneo de Madrid; in Porto Alegre, Identity,
hibridism, diference. FestFoto Brazil 2019. Fundação Ibere Camargo; in
Los Angeles, HOPE. ESMoA El Segundo Museum of Art; in Mexico City, Doble
Play. Fotografía cubana. Foto Museo 4 Caminos; in Milano, Cuba. Tatuare
la storia. PAC Padiglione D Arte Contemporanea; in Prague, Cuba en
vivo. DOX Centre For Contemporary Art; and Colonia, Colimadores. Michael
Horbach Stiftung; and others group shows in America, Europe and Cuba.
He has participated in numerous art events such as The Others Artfair,
MIA Artfair, SetUp Artfair, 6th Contemporary Cuban Art Salon, and
others. Among the awards received, include: Special Mention SetUp,
Italy; 21 Creation Study Scholarship “Discontinuous Room” Project,
Visual Art Development Center (CDAV), Cuba; First Prize, IV Biennial of
Photography in memoriam Alfredo Sarabia, Cuba; and prizes awarded in the
II and IV International Festival of Video Art in Camagüey, Cuba. His
works integrated into the collection of the Hood Museum of Art,
Dartmouth College; North Carolina Museum of Art and Fondazione Sicilia,
Palazzo Branciforte. @r.miguelon84
Yenny Hernández Valdés is a researcher, critic, curator, and cultural manager. She has a degree and a master’s degree in Art History from the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Havana. Member of the Hermanos Saiz Association (AHS), Criticism and Research section; the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and the Union of Historians of Cuba (UNHIC). In 2016 she was awarded an Honourable Mention by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), 2016 edition of Young Critics Incentive. She works as a specialist and cultural manager at the Palacio del Segundo Cabo: Center for the Interpretation of Cultural Relations Cuba-Europe (OHC). She is an instructor professor at the University of Havana with a subject program on Cuban culture at the Faculty of Foreign Languages (FLEX).
She is co-author of the books “Cultural experiences in the Palacio del Segundo Cabo: strategies for participation, interpretation and creation” (2018, Ediciones Boloña, Cuba); and “Yuniel Delgado Castillo: selected works” (2018, Ediciones Siranga, Spain); and compiler of “Coloquios Presencias europeas en Cuba. Memorias” 2017-2018 (2018, Ediciones Boloña, Cuba). She has published texts on magazines such as Kolaj Magazine, Cuban Art, Noticias de Arte Cubano, CdeCuba, Magenta, Art Crónica, Negra; as well as on the web: El Sr. Corchea, Art On Cuba, La Jiribilla and Cuban Art News. She has given conferences and lectures at national and international events on Cuban culture and visual arts. Among her curatorships are “Mío, tuyo, nuestro”, in the framework of the “Noviembre Fotográfico” event (2016); Hominium 3, within the framework of the XIII Havana Biennial (2019); and When the Memory Turns to Dust (2020).
Terremoto La Postal is an exhibition program, launched by Terremoto Magazine (Mexico City, MX) in 2018, that seeks to contribute both to the promotion and actualization of both critical reviews of art history in the Americas, as well as current discussions about curatorship as an experimental field for the anti-patriarchal exhibition of archival researches. @terremoto_mx
Still from ‘La brisa va, la brisa viene’ Comfort in Disturbance scene from animated short by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, 2021.
For accessibility purposes, an Alt Text version of this Q&A is available with image descriptions here, viewable by screen readers for those who might have trouble seeing this content. Special thanks to Darryl Terrell and
Nina Lucey for helping edit this text.
Since October 2020 when the following email correspondence began, we saw the “end” of the Trump era, the violent mob of white supremacists at the US capital, the Covid-19 pandemic ravage Black, Latinx, and indigenous communities, and a rise in consciousness toward the plight of our AAPI communities facing an often undiscussed or invisibilized racism. That is to say another day, another dollar in Amerikkka.
Jesús Hilario-Reyes is a Puerto Rico-born artist of Dominican descent with a lot of insights into the above-mentioned turmoil. Life’s many storms, be they personal loss or racism in the aftermaths of natural disasters, are a constant of their work. In their responses, they share many intimate moments of mourning in a truly heartfelt, intellectual, and open exchange of ideas and emotions. I feel so much love, admiration, and gratitude for Hilario-Reyes’ work and experiences shared here. Everything they say is necessary, every truth and utterance essential for us all to hear.
For those unfamiliar with Hilario-Reyes, they are “an interdisciplinary artist located at the crossroads of sonic performance, new media, and expanded cinema.” Through “iterative works” they grapple with the “impossibility of the black body, the failure of mechanical optics, and the reverb of cultural dissonance.” Hilario-Reyes makes extraordinary performances and 3D animated video works, “remixing, fragmenting and abstracting my own positionality and history as a second generation, queer, black-indigenous, immigrant, born in Puerto Rico, and whose family emigrated from the Dominican Republic.”
Additionally, through the DJ moniker Morennxxx, Hilario-Reyes is quite a fixture in the underground queer, electronic, nightlife of NYC and the world over. But they are most interested in the creative and communal spaces; “they exist in cyberspace or in real life (IRL); these projects grapple with multiplicity and safety.”
Since October, several hardships fell Hilario-Reyes, so we paused our collaboration on this dialogue to allow time for reflection and healing in an increasingly tumultuous world. But way back in October 2020 Hilario-Reyes shared what they were reading, “Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto” by Legacy Russell, which I enjoyed in audio-book form over several bubble baths. And I shared an essay, “After the Hurricane: Afro-Latina Decolonial Feminisms and Destierro” by Yomaira Figueroa, a renowned scholar in Global Afro-Diaspora Studies. I was pleasantly surprised to see Figueroa’s concept of destierro made its way into Hilario-Reyes’ recent work, performing “Destierro” at Fire Island’s inaugural Juneteenth Celebration.
*Here we go:*
Jose Luis Benavides: Thank you for sending me so many images of your work-in-progress, ‘La brisa va, la brisa viene’, the work you’ve successfully crowdfunded for and have been making throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. This work and your past work contend with hurricanes, disasters, and your own personal experiences within the Afro-Puerto Rican diaspora. We see here lots of images of water and flooding. What does water mean to you, how are you relating to it as a material for making these digital images and how do you feel about depicting these flooding or overflowing images?
Jesús Hilario-Reyes: My thoughts in regard to water or bodies of water have drastically changed in the past month or so. I feel as though I may have had a sort of naïve approach or understanding of water and its power. I’ve never had a fear of water, but definitely a reasonable amount of what lies within. I learned how to swim quite early in my life, so not knowing is not necessarily within my memory. I spent about 6 years on a swim team, swimming competitively in club, and with my high school varsity team. I have always considered myself a strong swimmer, and have trained to be a lifeguard.
With that in mind, I have always found peace with being in the water. I tend to go to bodies of water whenever I feel too heavy and need to release. I have a very devotional relationship with bodies of water, and my experiences with them have transformed me in the most beautiful fulfilling ways. On my last trip to Puerto Rico in late March or early April I got to know the power of the ocean much more. Long story short, a young child, probably in middle school, got caught in a riptide at Condado Beach. She was dragged out behind the waves and was panicking, I noticed her quickly and began to swim towards her, riding the riptide along the way.
Still from ‘La brisa va, la brisa viene’ Comfort in Disturbance scene from animated short by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, 2021.
As I got to her, I got her to hold on to my body like I was trained to when I did my lifeguard training. But I did that training in a pool and not in the ocean. My body quickly exhausted itself from holding her up. And I felt the strength of my body dwindle. I could only imagine how this poor child was feeling, but luckily a few other people noticed what was happening and came to save both of us from drowning. The other problem was that the current was pulling us further out and we had to exhaust more energy to fight the current and ride the waves coming toward land. We ended up being pummeled by waves into large rocks. Here we felt safer since we were much closer to other people and only had the worry of maybe getting cuts and bruises from the rocks. Afterward, we made sure she was okay and got her to a medic nearby.
I was with some friends who were also visiting, who didn’t even notice this all happening haha, as they were busy flirting with their trade. We got really drunk and had a great night afterward. It didn’t hit me at first, the importance of that experience until later in my trip The next morning, a friend of mine who also happened to be in Puerto Rico on vacation, headed out to visit the Rainforest with their ‘Trade’ they have been talking to. They ended up at Playa Escondida, which is a secluded beach that is very difficult to get to, you have to hike 30 minutes through a mangrove forest.
This beach is considered one of the most dangerous beaches on the island, because of its strong riptides and its subterranean cave system that tends to drag people under. I came to find this out, after doing research on what happened next. I’m not sure how it happened, but they ended up getting pulled out at sea and the person they were with, the ‘trade’ mentioned before, actually drowned and passed away. The police were called to remove his body from the water.
My experience and my friends have sort of demolished what I thought about the ocean generally. I am a huge fan of Drexciya, an American electronic music duo composed of James Stinson and Gerald Donald. Who was based in Detroit, Michigan, and was a huge leading star in the development of Techno. They created this expansive sonic realm that envisioned Drexciya as this underwater civilization composed of mutated human beings who were able to adapt and sustain life underwater. These Drexciyan’s were descendants of newborn babies thrown off the ledge of ships, during the middle passage by enslaved African women. This world-building not only expanded in the deep ocean but also in deep space, a sort of trajectory that was hopeful and transformative of generational trauma.
I’m a true fanatic, but also a techno-centric DJ and their ideologies show up a lot in my ideas. I believe the practice of Love has a lot to do with the ability to imagine otherwise (will talk about later) With that in mind, water is incredibly bigger than us. Water often feels like a vehicle, it sort of brings you back… every time. It reminds you of your mortality, of the fragility of life, and the expansiveness of this world, this planet. It shrinks you, and undoes you -spiritually, physically in every way. It also holds so much and has space for it. It’s abundant and scarce at the same time. It has the potential to destroy you, your home, and your sense of stability. It can completely destabilize an entire nation. Especially in this case.
I want to emphasize that; I do not believe that space is the place, I do not believe that deep-underwater civilizations are the answer. I truly believe that we are just enough, that we as human beings on Earth are just enough. The absurdity and rightful one of imagining otherwise- to places we have not adapted to, biologically is valiant and important. These images and scenes with flooding water create an uninhabitable (for comfortable human life) or ravaged scenario, where the character is moving through this space, burdened. Is the exact absurdity that comes with this reality we exist in.
This work looks at Carnival practices and how characters are created. For example, the carnivals following the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were adaptive, in the creation of new figures within the celebration. Certain communities ridiculed governmental personnel (whose actions and misactions lead to the destruction of many Black communities) by creating characters around them. This sort of ridicule is at the heart of Carnival practices since the beginning of its conception.
That’s what I’m communicating with these images. Ridicule, Absurdity. My concern with this is how this work reads to my family and to other environmental disaster survivors. I’m trying to handle this project with care. So I ask my family how they feel about it, and what surfaces when they see these images. My mother, who has persevered through many hurricanes, tells me about how her experiences or thoughts around hurricanes resurface, but she isn’t retraumatized. She’s more supportive of the ways I’m navigating these heavy ideas. I’ve asked my family who lives there now and it’s the same response from them. Talking about this as a means of coping but also transforming their experience into a healthier more sustainable understanding of community.
Still from ‘La brisa va, la brisa viene’ Undying Sound scene from animated short by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, 2021.
JLB: Yomaira Figueroa describes “the concept of destierro” as “an untranslatable term for exile in Spanish, which is akin to being torn from land because destierro remains a relevant and precarious condition for Black and Indigenous peoples”. You mentioned having some conversations about displacement and Puerto Rico with your mother after reading the essay. What did you talk about and how do you feel about this notion of destierro?
JHR: Ever since reading about this concept of ‘destierro’, my understanding of my work has deepened profoundly. I feel as though this concept was what I’ve been making work around for a while now, but I didn’t have the language for it. I recently have been having conversations with my mother, my aunts, and my grandfather. Much of these conversations were surrounding their migration to America. But through further inspection, it turns out this move toward the artificial American dream was a response to the job crisis as a result of the Trujillo dictatorship.
That was news to me, and then further contextualized what I’ve been thinking about in regards to fugitivity, and immigration. And then what ignited the move toward the states was the scarcity of available jobs/careers on the island, as a result of political corruption. I think about ‘destierro’ in all of this. The ways in which the trickle-down effects of political, and economic ruptures, dispossess specifically Black and Brown communities, in this false race for the American Dream. It also applies to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and how it has forced many people off the island, forced them to move to the states, and even face homelessness.
Yomaira mentions Jacqui M. Alexander’s work (Pedagogies of Crossing) in her essay with this quote “Alexander argues that people in exile/diaspora “ have grown up metabolizing exile, feeding on its main by-products –alienation and separation” She asks us to think specifically about the position of being “African American and exiled on the spot where one is born. To be Caribbean and exiled on foreign soil produces a longing so deep that the site of neglect is reminiscent of beauty”. Here she underscores the ontological and phenomenological aspects of being exiled and dispossessed in multigenerational contexts” I felt particularly understood towards the end of this essay where Yomaira states “Across these works, the act of remembering and awakening the memories of home/lands, land practices, and resistance to uprooting are tools of resistance against ‘destierro’.
Recently I was commissioned by Fire Island Residency to do a series of performances for their Juneteenth festivities. I performed some of my new work entitled ‘Falling so fast”. But I was also able to do an iteration of these ‘crop circles’ I mentioned. I’m thinking of calling these works ‘crossings’. My first iteration is below as photographed with my drone. This land installation is about 200 feet long and stretches from where the water kisses the sand to the start of the dunes. This work takes on a remedial approach to the effects of destierro. I found it particularly beautiful, reflective, and critical, for this work to be ephemeral. It develops this relationship of erasure with the ocean and the wind, and those passing through it.
After two weeks, this work completely disappeared. I think it really speaks to the politics surrounding fire island, in regards to stolen land… but also its ephemerality or disappearance is sort of embedded within the mechanics of queer spaces. And goes back to what we’re talking about in regard to fugitivity. Nonetheless, this work was made with my partner and lover Marques Rice - on an island where ‘wildness’ seems to be the undercurrent.
Documentation of “Untitled”, land art installed at Fire Island by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, 2021.
I recently attended a zoom panel discussion, with Yomaira Figueroa, Sarah Bruno, Anais Delilah Roque, and Beth Colon Pizzini entitled ‘Puerto Rican Studies: Current and Future Practices. Here I was able to directly ask Yomaira and Sarah questions in regard to all of this. I forget what I asked exactly but Sarah responded with such a beautiful answer.
“I’m thinking through bomba as a place of healing, particularly after the earthquakes and after Maria and within the diaspora where it becomes the Batey or the dancefloor/circle. It really operates outside of time and outside of pinned geographic space, and because it is built on care and intimacy, and its embodied long enduring history that-its within the body, it is within the music, it’s in the rhythm, and it is inscribed into the Batey itself. It becomes a balm for destierro. For those who have been ripped away or born not knowing, knowing that you’re just never going to be able to see sovereignty.
And so in that way, I see it also akin to Blackness, and how it’s centered in my understanding of Bomba as well as the Caribbean. And I see it more so with fluidity, Bomba is also a space where I see migration from the rest of the Caribbean, and it becomes this place in Puerto Rican history, where other people from- St.Croix, from Haiti they come to Bomba, because of its musical resemblance, and it becomes a place of welcome. And it really reestablishes Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in the diaspora back into this Black geography that the United States has worked so hard to really distance us from”
When I tell you I was jumping in my chair!!! This is what it’s about, this is how we’ve done it, this is how it’s evolving. Every time I visit home, I go to Terraza de Bomba Bonanza, where they play bomba- which happens every Monday night. And this time it was located in La Perla, because of rigid covid safety protocols on the island. And La Perla is known for its low police activity given the layout of the land, it makes sense for the Batey to exist there right now. And I felt it…that feeling of liberation, healing, love, transcendence, community, care, that Sarah mentions.
But was also similar and reminded me of to the feeling I get from dancing for hours at raves specifically organized by Black and Brown Queer people. It is in these spaces that centralize queerness and Blackness, where these ideas surrounding blurring, subversion, and futurity, are embodied, practiced, and taught. It is important to understand that these places can and do exist and theory is important but the experience is even more felt within! There are also other things that come into the conversation in regard to raves, police, and the culture of social media, but sometimes and I mean that sometimes dance liberation is at the heart of it all.
JLB: I think there’s a flow between Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism and what Yomaira Figueroa is saying when she’s “destierro takes form as a dispossession of spiritual syncretic practices, alienation from the body, refusal of memories, and the physical deprivation of land. Across these works, the act of remembering and awakening the memories of home/lands, land practices, and resistance to uprooting are tools of resistance against destierro.” Could you describe the connections to land, transformation, and liberation in your current work?
JHR: My bad, I guess I already started going into this but yeah…
I think you’re right Legacy Russell and Yomaira Figueroa both identify ways in which glitch goes about subverting and nuance in relation to the systems at play. That being said, I think that land practices in relation to the work I’m doing feels most akin to the ideas brought about in Glitch Feminism and ‘Destierro’. Specifically, in Akin to the Hurricane and now currently in ‘La Brisa Va, La Brisa Viene’, they both employ this sense of mobility. Movement and masquerade are important in both of these works because of the ways in which they resist identification.
In Glitch Feminism, Russell states ‘Still, the machinic bias enacted by the panopticon of the mapping of the body through digital technologies is filled with hopeful holes, leaving us to ask: If a body is not legible as a body, and therefore cannot be read, will it be “seen”? Can it ghost, skirting the omnipresent digital eye? Failing recognition, can it successfully cease to exist?” And I’m beginning to grapple with disappearance, and ghosting in the coming scenes of ‘the breeze comes, the breeze goes’. But more so finding autonomy and liberation within it. Of course in strategic ways but…
I’m not sure if I fully agree that this ‘strategic illegibility’ is a move toward liberation, but it certainly is a move of resistance. I worry also, and question, if these modes of resistance are aforementioned akin to the modes of glitch Legacy, talks about? A part of me doesn’t feel that they are akin to one another. But more so adjacent.
Still from ‘La brisa va, la brisa viene’ Architectural Familial scene from animated short by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, 2021.
Nonetheless, liberation is at the spearhead of my practice, the feeling of it is the fuel for its trajectory. That, in tandem with the motif of transformation transpiring in my recent work–I’ve recently finished reading the Parable of the Sower diptych by Octavia Butler and have been so deeply moved. I found myself identifying and devoting myself to the Earth Seed ideology and seeing some of its teachings in my work. Specifically the central teaching of it; “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”
I’ve been sitting with this book a lot, and been thinking of how migration and autonomy play huge roles in the underlying motifs surrounding the protagonist- but also how these movements inform the characters growth through self-sovereignty, and finding belonging and meaning amidst the chaos.
I still struggle with ideas that tend to exalt Black people into something more than human, or mutated, or god-like as a means to elevate Black culture and our love for ourselves. I don’t agree with that notion, we should not have to do such things. That sort of performativity of success is toxic and deeply capitalistic, it leaves no room for the actual humanity of Black people. But I do find it empowering, to practice autonomy in the ways in which we conduct change–that is the groundwork of Akin to the Hurricane.
Documentation of “Akin to the Hurricane: Iteration 04” performed at ACRE Residency, photographed by Ryan Bach, 2018.
I’ve also been reading “The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis” by T.J. Demos. And he makes this beautiful remark that I found akin to this larger conversation about fugitivity, blackness, queerness, and liberation. It goes as follows,
“…migration identifies something uncapturable and unmeasurable, something ever mobile and unfamiliar. Far from designating a completely disempowered status, this approach sees migration taking on a certain agency, autonomy, and potentiality.”
He makes these remarks as a suggestion for the condition of being human, and ‘determining a politics of equality on that basis.”
JLB: To move from just these academic theories toward your lived and day-to-day experiences as a non-binary Black and Caribbean artist living in the diaspora, how might you relate to the idea of destierro “as a term that can capture the complex and multiple forms of dispossession and impossibilities of home for Afro and Indigenous descended peoples in the modern world”? Could destierro or this kind of embrace of the storm or becoming the storm in your work, “push […] toward liberatory practices, and map different forms of dispossession and resistance across intersecting identities.”
JHR: I think this embrace of the storm is absolutely a ‘push’ toward liberatory practices. In much of the rhetoric behind my work and even my collaboration with Leah Solomon’s ‘In Hot Time’, this motif of vertical motion–this whirlwind, disorients or circumvents the viewer or at least seeks to. This everlasting state of motion is fugitive, and that fugitivity is in tandem with the nature of Blackness and Queerness. This whirlwind or the storm in this case becomes a symbolic space. To embrace the storm is synonymous with the blur. Fred Moten is probably one of my favorite writers but in his book Black on Blur, he elaborates,
“Disorder is our service, our antidote, and anteroom, our vestibule without a story. We can’t survive intact. We can only survive if we’re not intact. Our danger and saving power is an always open door. Our venue is mutual infusion, the holy of holies in the wall, glory in a kind of open chastity, where the explicit body reveals itself demure in disappearance. Unenforced, slid, venereally unnatural, and convivial, we claim slur against drill and document. Confirmation of the flesh is queer and evangelical”
I’ve held onto this statement for a while now and I think about this in regard to what Sarah spoke about - saying “Bomba is the balm to destierro”. That in these fractured, fragmented, bodies - disorder becomes that ‘push’ toward liberatory practices. That in the improvisational, sporadic, gorgeous, melodic, harmonious, chaotic space of the batey we find our antidote. That through dance, we’re able to disembody while simultaneously being embodied.
This embrace of the storm is definitely not about welcoming natural disasters and having that be the method of this idea. I firmly believe that climate change is an agent of white supremacy and that climate change disproportionately affects communities of color and lower economic status.
It’s clear to me how the things that fall under this idea of ‘destierro’ have affected my individual self as well as my families and those around me. I mentioned before the political, governmental, and economic turmoil in our mother country was the agent that caused our migration. As well as how Hurricane Maria has affected my family and their relation to nature and land, also how it has affected much of the Puerto Rican population. Even in the most familial sense, there are forces far larger than the individual that urges us to move outward, away– growing up queer in the mid-west with a heteronormative family and not having access to a community, will unearth you. And it did.
JLB: Among other things, Legacy Russell is really interested in amplifying the blurry lines between our IRL and AFK selves. From your unique intersection of identities and experiences with the performance and art world, as a DJ in the queer underground dance world in NYC, and from your own personal history in Milwaukee and Chicago. Can you describe the very real and felt a connection to community and the virtual world building you’re into or the digital worlds you’re creating and how they’re connected to your day-to-day of being Afro-Puerto Rican and non-binary?
JHR: After reading Glitch Feminism, I started to embrace more of the URL aspect of it all. I read this book while I was on a social media hiatus. At times and honestly as I write this I feel like the internet isn’t the most hospitable for me. I definitely think there are beautiful moments that happen in this space and it allows us to exist in multitudes, and that’s sort of the promise of the internet. It’s an endless space that is bountiful with information and can answer many of your questions.
Still from the anime “Serial Experiments Lain” by Ryūtarō Nakamura, 1998.
But much of it is unfulfilling, I think we’re living in this dystopian cyberpunk reality that people want to reimagine time and time again– It’s as simple as this quote from Serial Experiments Lain, a sci-fi anime tv show from the late 90s where Lain, the protagonist who developed a unique connection to virtual reality network called ‘The Wired’, states the “internet is awesome, but you can’t download love”.
Sure this anime was made before the invention of social media– I believe the failure of the internet is within its promise, we cannot expect this space to be boundless when it’s so deeply intertwined with transactional relationships. It costs to have access, and within its commercial root we lose the capability to really transform ourselves, our interest becomes commodities - most things feel performative and tied to branding or some sort of revenue. Even if it’s authentic, this is the nature of social media. Although we have these architectural in-capabilities – the internet, especially for queer people does become or can become a space to extend community. The internet has probably morphed every bit of myself, it’s so deeply communal that it can be very anxious.
Obviously, the internet/virtual world is massive and definitely has room for expressions of love. Recently, I organized a memorial celebration with Club Quarantine for my late best friend Terrell Davis. Who was and is one of the most recognizable and prolific designers working with CGI in the revival of Y2K aesthetics! Terrell would always be in Club Quarantine, (a group of organizers creating and hosting parties on Zoom, throughout the Covid-19 Pandemic). And I think about the conversations we had in regard to raves and parties organized by queer people of color and how he didn’t feel comfortable in those spaces. And that’s kind of what I hinted at before in how these spaces don’t exist in a vacuum – that these spaces also deal with a status quo.
But during his celebration, I really felt this beautiful expression of love and community within my body. It had me tweeting, and yelling out loud IRL that “LOVE IS REAL “ in all caps because it felt so embodied. It felt like he was there with us, and made me think about how he will exist online even past his death. How the online or URL aspect of people live on in this stagnant state well after their death. But also how love can be shared through this space. I don’t know…I’m still processing the effects of the pandemic. I see how I’m contradicting myself…but I feel like that’s okay.
I truly believe that World Building is a practice of Love. A friend of mine shared with me a quote in the midst of all of this happening–that really gifted me with so much affirmation, and moved me to tears. I visit it quite often, this is from Valarie Kaur, a Sikh-American lawyer, and activist,
“Love is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving—a choice we make over and over again. If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love”
Still from ‘La brisa va, la brisa viene’ This is where it happens scene from animated short by Jesús Hilario-Reyes, 2021.
[Image description: Collage with a light yellow background and black and white images. Five I.D. photographs of Jácome at various ages framed in black are aligned horizontally at the top. In the first image she is about 4 years old. In the last one she is 25. In the bottom there is a spinal x-ray with an overlapped line of Spanish text that reads: A diagnosis will be made based on specialized tests. Image Source: García Jácome, A. (2020).]
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Join us for a virtual lecture performance and discussion with internationally exhibiting visual artist Ana García Jácome. On Sunday, June 27, 2021 at 6pm Garcia Jácome will give an intimate table read of her 2020 published article, “It’s Like She Never Existed: The Family Story and the Assembly of Disability”. Following the performance we will discuss several of her video works and career engaging zine art, Disability Studies and contemporary practices.
Register in advance for this special performance and discussion with Ana Garcia Jácome on Sunday, June 27, 2021 at 6pm: Register here. The event will have auto generated captions. Transcript of the reading available here. A subtitled version of the whole event will be available afterwards.
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Ana Garcia Jácome’s incredibly personal and moving approach to video incorporates performance, weight, gravity, and the body in truly inspiring ways. Her imaginative and intimate work delves into histories of occlusion spanning from personal narrative to socio-political identity. Her work holds a sense of reserve and vulnerability packed with a uniquely cautious charge. Her material floats at times, levitating viewers toward themes which pull one back down to earth, with a constant reminder of the full weight of the body.
Sin Cinta Previa is honored to present several video works, a live lecture performance, and discussion with Ana Garcia Jácome. Bringing awareness to histories of ableism while rethink privilege and visibility, her work causes us to reassess the image: who the image is for, who it might represent, and the accessibility of images. Her work also asks what is the artist’s role and responsibility in reproducing visual hierarchies. Ana Garcia Jácome’s oeuvre opens our world to deeper empathy, understanding and possibilities for all folks along multiple body-mind spectrums while primarily considering varied abilities and a range of cognitive experiences of the world.
You may also see the work of Garcia Jácome, We Protest Against Polio in the exhibition What Flies But Never Lands? at the Chicago Cultural Center on view June 2, 2021 to September 4, 2021. She is also exhibiting portions of “It’s like she never existed” opening on July 2, 2021 at Prizer Gallery in Austin, Texas.
Es como si nunca hubiera existido by Ana Garcia Jácome, 2018, 22:03 min.
“It’s Like She Had Never Existed” seeks to understand how the narrative of disability is built within a family and how it impacts the person that embodies it. It looks at the roles that the family album, oral memories and documents have in legitimizing the family history and connecting it to a wider societal context.
The [ ] History of Disability in Mexico, by Ana Garcia Jácome, 2021, 15:38 min.
“The [ ] History of Disability in Mexico” traces the different conceptions and representations of disability in México from the 1940s to 2020s looking at the words used to define and describe disability and thinking of the role of discourse in building abled-disabled relationships.
About the artist:
Ana García Jácome is a Mexican visual artist that graduated from the School of Arts and Design of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (FAD, UNAM) and got an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the support of the scholarship program of Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo. She works with different media such as drawing, writing, video and archives. Her practice addresses the social construction of disability and looks for ways to rearticulate its narratives. In 2016 she was part of the Photographic Production Seminar at Centro de la Imagen. She had the Young Creators grant from FONCA in the 2017-2018 period. Her work has been exhibited at the Autonomus Gallery of the FAD, Centro Cultural Casa Talavera, and Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City; ULTRAcinema festival in Guelatao, Oaxaca: Links Hall, 6018North, and Wabash Window at SAIC in Chicago. @anafantasma
Sin Cinta Previa + Chuquimarca are proud to present
“What’s another word for survival?”, a Zoom artist panel and online video presentation of works by Lorena Cruz Santiago, Adrián García,
Valeria Montoya, Mateo Vargas and Martin Wannam
Join us for an artists panel discussion on Sat., Dec. 19, 2020, 7:30-8:30 PM (CST). Zoom Registration: https://bit.ly/33e78QV
This is the second of two online features and artist panels of video-art submissions from our SCP+C Open Call 2020 juried by Malia Haines-Stewart and Giselle Mira-Diaz, generously supported by the Propeller Fund.
How are you? How do yo feel? How’s your family doing? How are you coping with the pandemic? These questions, life lines, and check-ins have become vital to our survival. But survival seems a strange word these days. Survival is not the same as “to survive” or “surviving” which sound more present tense, more actual, now, and ongoing. Amidst this never-ending pandemic, an attack on our livelihoods, our friends and family, our economic stability, our sense of place and the solvency of our communities remains in question. We’re all just trying to keep it together. Trying to survive.
But, really though, how are our peoples doing? Our peoples, be they Central American kin, our immigrant families, our vulnerable indigenous communities across North America, or our various Latinx diaspora in the US. How are we doing across the Americas? How are we coping with these legacies of colonialism revived in the weaponization of illness against our peoples?
And what is felt, known, unspoken and perhaps forgotten in this survival mode? As the pandemic rages and we all recover our vision from the slow motion train wreck and sudden whiplash of the recent US election; what questions and concerns, what hopes and fears linger in our hearts from a time, if we can imagine, before COVID-19? What were the major issues concerning our varied communities prior to “the election”? What was on our mind before the lockdowns and quarantines?
Responding to our Open Call from February 2020, this second round of awardees resound as a defiant response to the various systems of oppression that mark our peoples. From gender defiance, spiritual plains of resistance, indigenous language and knowledge systems, and other survival tactics such as performance, walking, rituals and fire, these works animate our feelings and concerns. Ranging from Guatemala, Mexico and through to the US, these videos echo non-binary, queer, feminists and indigenous methods of resistance and healing.
This exceptional group of artists use the craft of their hands, lens, eyes, body, time and performance to cause us pause. They make us ask, “How do you say ‘what do we need’?” in our mother tongues. We thank and celebrate Lorena Cruz Santiago, Adrián García, Valeria Montoya, Mateo Vargas and Martin Wannam. We thank them for submitting their art during a pandemic. For having hope in our world enough to share of themselves. We thank them for reminding us to fully feel and hold on to our emotions. To revel in their perpetual questions of self. Their questioning may drive us through the turmoil of today’s limited survival toward tomorrow’s fight for a more equitable and inclusive world.
Relief (Alivio) is a video / performance protesting the mismanagement of the Trump administration in the United States in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
DO YOU/DID YOU? by Lorena Cruz Santiago, 2018, 3:15 min.
DO YOU/DID YOU is a video that examines the legacy of colonialism and how it manifests through assimilation. Inspired by Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” the video uses music as a jumping off point to discuss more insidious aspects of being a first generation American.
Frontera by Adrián García 2019. 10:16 min.
Born as a collaboration with Chilean filmmaker Cecilia Cornejo, Frontera, a stop-motion/paper-cut animation video, lives a double life. On the one hand, some of the sequences have been incorporated into Cornejo’s soon to be released documentary on migration: Ways of Being Home, about the Mexican community of Northfield, MN. On the other hand, this one, Frontera presents itself as a 10-minute animation piece that combines nightmare and childish imagery to represent, sometimes with humor, sometimes poetically, others utterly pessimistic, the crossing of the desert in the US-Mexico border.
Una Separación by Mateo Vargas, 2019, 3:57 min.
Una Separación (A Separation) is a video/performance piece of personal mourning of the pain of forced migrant family separations in Trump’s America.
Sombrero Astral, by Valeria Montoya, year, 4:25 min.
This video documentation of wearable sculptures designed and created by Valeria Montoya, shows body extensions encouraging walking as an essential practice to study and experience the land. Through these sculptures, Montoya also investigates moving images, moving bodies and motion. Her performative and sculptural machines create moving images unmediated by any electrical device, worn in order to be performed.
These sculptures also work as Astral Hats, a metaphor Montoya uses to symbolically unite the human body with the sky, the astral space, the Earth, and gravity as forces we constantly feel through our feet on the ground. The reflected moving images projected through these wearable sculptures explore the visual limits of landscape, not only as an image but as a lived and embodied experience.
While wearing these sculptures and walking with them, corporeal consciousness is activated through each step. Awareness of our own body driven and sense based learning breaks with normative conventions of the image’s limited scope, helping us learn how to see with other body and to decenter the eye.
White Jesus by Martin Wannam, 2020, 19:06 min.
Questioning whiteness and its power relation within a space Wannam positions himself in La Santa Iglesia Catedral Metropolitana de Santiago de Guatemala where he enters the frame with a Catholics icon made out of white chocolate. He sexually licks, chews and then spits out the white chocolate until there is no recognizable icon but only a white mass. Doing so to expose the roll of whiteness within religion, he uses his body to express his stance on religion in relation to whiteness. Through this performance he physically heals and expels the traumas imposed by Western culture.
Tejidos by Lorena Cruz Santiago, 2019, 1:30 min.
Tejidos is a work centered on indigeneity featuring the Mixtec language and weaving practices from Oaxaca, Mexico. It asks the questions “Who are we? Who do we want to be? Where are we? Where do we want to be? What do we have? What do we need?
Lorena Cruz Santiago is a Mexican-American artist from Northern California, currently based in Detroit, MI. She received her BFA in Photography from Sonoma State University in 2016 and her MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2019. Through an interdisciplinary practice that spans photography, video, and painting, she investigates post-colonial theory and decolonization. www.lorenacruzsantiago.com @lorenacruzz
Adrián García (b. 1990, León, México) is a filmmaker and stop motion animator. His practice thinks of animation as an atomization of time, a mindful contemplation of the connections between an instant and eternity in the embodiment we call duration. He completed his master in visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019 with a thesis on the material culture of grieving. He currently teaches audiovisual production in Tecnológico de Monterrey León Campus. https://vimeo.com/utopicks/ @exmoamadis
Valeria Montoya practices urban walking as a tool to think about the political, somatic and imaginative possibilities of site specific art making, and curatorial practice. She is still learning to walk. Born as a Mexican Latina Woman, 1983, she also founded The Lab Program: Art Research and Art Mobility Network based in Mexico City in 2017, as a space to develop an artistic understanding of the cultural entanglements in which contemporary Mexican culture navigates. https://valeriaxmontoya.tumblr.com/ @valerialalalele/
Mateo Vargas (b. 1993) is a queer non-binary Mexican-American writer, photographer, filmmaker, performance and visual artist whose multi-media work focuses on the intersections and fractures of identity, borders, and diaspora under the dual legacies of colonialism and late-stage capitalism. Their video art has screened in festivals and galleries in the United States, Mexico, Japan, Colombia, Cuba, Argentina, Germany, Greece, Italy and France. https://vimeo.com/mate0vargas @_mateo_vargas
Martin Wannam (b. 1992, Guatemala) is a visual artist whose work utilizes photography, performance, and sculpture to disrupt the meaning of religion, folklore, and western beauty standards. Through the critical lenses of history, gender, sexuality, and race he challenges his own cultural background and deconstructs and disrupts the hegemony of religion as his own gesture of political resistance. www.martinwannam.com @martinwannamremix
Sin Cinta Previa + Chuquimarca are proud to present Tempo falacioso; Superimposiciones botánicas, an online video presentation of works by
Luíza Bastos Lages, Nancy D. Valladares, and Chucho Ocampo.
Join us for a panel discussion with the artists on Sat. Sept. 26th at 7:30 PM (CST). Please RSVP for the Zoom invitation here.
This online feature was awarded and selected from our juried SCP+C Open Call 2020. This is the first of two screenings from our open call juried by Malia Haines-Stewart and Giselle Mira-Diaz, generously supported by the Propeller Fund.
Tempo falacioso; Superimposiciones botánicasis a selection of video works by artists Luiza Bastos Lages, Chucho Ocampo and Nancy D. Valladares. This program looks at the technologies and infrastructures that sustained the colonial project, disseminated euro-western epistemologies, and transported colonial projects throughout Latin America. By layering archive footage and oral traditions, history is retold through the alchemy of gunpowder, the slow melting of a pillar of ice, and microscopic worlds of botanical images.
The films reveal the crossings of worlds in their respective geographies, and aim to disobey the temporal lines of history as told by a euro-western lens. Paisagens Ficcionais [Fictional Landscapes] is a slow emergence of the commodification of forms of life and their transit across the hemisphere, Castillo unfolds the various geopolitical forces that drive human and more than human migrants in Mexico, and The Density of Breath meditates on botanical exchanges that produced plantation economies and extraction in Latin America. Tempo falacioso; Superimposiciones Botánicas asks the viewers to reflect on the incommensurability between history, representation, memory and anthropocentric paradigms of domination.
The Density of Breath
by Nancy D. Valladares (2020) 13 min 04 sec.
Shot with an electronic microscope,The Density of Breath is a meditation on plant agency, and botanical representation. What does a seed know about the flavor of the atmosphere; about the texture of the air and its currents, about its ebbs and flows, that we do not? Seeds learned to move in the currents of the ocean and the wind, to float on water and air, to become the first stowaways and hitchhikers. In pursuit of plant matter and the expansion of the human visual apparatus, technologies of plant transportation and representation marked a pivotal ecological and cognitive shift.
Paisagens Ficcionais [Fictional Landscapes] by Luíza Bastos Lages (2020) 24 min 23 sec.
Paisagens Fictionais [Fictional Landscapes] interrogates the ephemerality of the contemporary landscape, and its transformation, as a means as well as a product of a hegemonic and fallacious project of modernity: the idea of progress. The work departs from a place in memory, the continuous dilapidation of mining landscapes of a stretch of the Iron Quadrangle, one of the major mineral provinces in the world, located in Minas Gerais, Brazil, the place where I grew up. The piece goes about the volatility of the landscape in relation to politics of extraction and its translation into capital, geographically transferred and realized elsewhere in the globe. Through the flow of capital, the landscape also moves, traded by means of their mined fragments.
By dealing with the commodification of the landscape and its flux in form of capital, the work seeks to elucidate how this exploratory process continues to structure the world in accumulating centers and degraded outskirts, since, in the dominant paradigm of progress, the sustenance of inequality is the foremost condition for its continuity, not a side effect to be overcome. The film Paisagens Ficcionais was produced from an interweaving of footage produced by the artist and archival footage produced by United States American Research Institutions about Brazil, as well as archival home footage.
Expect People to be Exhausted by Chucho Ocampo (2020) 13 min 19 sec.
Castillo is an artistic research exercise that superimposes information between systems that have no apparent or physical manifestation of interdependence but are capable of connecting despite borders. The research revolves around the movement of human and non human bodies and their relations with ephemeral structures and displays of communication as well as how ideas travel and relate to them. The research exercise explores and superimposes a thread of traveling ideas that deal with displacement and overlapping of symbols, ideologies, cultural practices and language.
About the artists:
Luíza Bastos Lages (b. 1988) is an artist and architect from Itabirito, Brazil. Luíza holds a professional degree in Architecture and Urban Planning from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil (2013) and a Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2020). Her most recent projects poetically address extraction and transnational privatization of forms of life merely seen as material resources; as well as the tentative erasure, by the current Brazilian government, of bodies that challenge predefined social expectations.
Nancy Dayanne Valladares (b. 1991) is an interdisciplinary artist from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Her work traces the colonial legacies and agricultural histories of Honduras through the lens of human and non-human migration. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2020). Her work has been exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago, Sullivan Galleries, SUGS Gallery X, ExFest Film Festival, The Research House for Asian Art, Columbia College, and Roman Susan Gallery in Chicago.
Chucho (Jesús) Ocampo Aguilar (Mexico, b. 1991) is an architect and artist working in the intersection of art, architecture and technology. Chucho is currently a Partner in dérive LAB, an art, architecture and urbanism firm where he works as Creative Director, particularly with projects related to housing, urban design, public space interventions and cultural management. Chucho is co-founder of BEMA, a cultural center in the heart of Querétaro, México; dedicated to Art, Architecture and the City. He is currently a first year SMACT candidate of the Art Culture and Technology program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Taste of “Jamaica y Tamarindo” Chicago Premiere + Q&A w/ Ebony Bailey
Q&A: Sat. July 25, 2020 at 6:30 PM - Subscribe to the filmfront newsletter for event Q&A Zoom link and VOD links to the films available July 20-25, 2020 or email info@filmfront.org for details.
Given the current spotlight on Black struggle in this country and in the world, and especially given the history of intraracial violence in our communities, we felt important to share the insightful and much needed work of Ebony Bailey to celebrate her excellence and foster dialogue and empowerment.
A dedicated documentarian, Ebony Bailey dives deep into the heart of her interests, her subject position and the real experiences of her community, a people often ignored and erased from the history books and media. As a self-identified “Blaxican,” she delves into various anomalies at the heart of anti-blackness in Mexican culture––but from a place of deep love and respect for her heritage and pride in her identities. Her body of documentary video work, and especially the premiere of her brand new short, “Jamaica y Tamarindo,” explores just how inherently Black or afro-descendant Mexican culture is already at its core. Bailey’s work is light, lyrical, humane and poignant. Watching her films one is drawn in by learning to challenge misconceptions through the sheer artistry and levity of her lens, her decisive cuts, and her marvelous ability as a storyteller.
Join us for a discussion with the award winning documentarian Ebony Bailey and local programmer, Janelle Ayana Miller, featuring the Chicago premiere of “Jamaica y Tamarindo” and an added bonus; her latest music video “Atolito con el dedo” for the AfroMexican band Aguaje Ensamble. This screening is curated by Jose Luis Benavides as part of the ongoing series Sin Cinta Previa. This event is made possible by the generous support of Propeller Fund . And special thanks to EPF Media.
About “Jamaica y Tamarindo”:
The jamaica flower and tamarind are iconic ingredients in Mexico, but their history comes from a place much further away. In Jamaica and Tamarindo: Afro Tradition in the Heart of Mexico, we meet five people to explore African heritage in Mexico City, an identity that goes beyond the color of one’s skin.
About the Director:
Ebony Bailey is a “Blaxican” filmmaker and photographer from Central California whose work explores cultural intersections and diaspora. Her photographs have appeared in NPR, LA Times and Remezcla. Her short documentary, “Life Between Borders: Black Migrants in Mexico” screened at film festivals and forums in the US, Mexico and Europe. In 2018, she was awarded the Samuel L. Coleman scholarship for emerging filmmakers at the Haitian International Film Festival. She is currently pursuing her Master’s degree in documentary film at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
About the Guest Speaker:
Janelle Ayana Miller is a grandchild of the Great Migration, a Midwestern with Southern inflection. Her practice is rooted within familial and communal aesthetics, looking deeply into bridging self and time as an act of place making while using modes of collage, found objects, film, food and photography. Miller has programmed film screenings at FilmFront and 6018NORTH.
Event Program:
JAMAICA Y TAMARINDO by Ebony Bailey, 2019, 19 min 46 sec (Trailer Below)
LIFE BETWEEN BORDERS (ENTRE FRONTERAS) by Ebony Bailey, 2017, 15 min 18 sec
ATOLITO CON EL DEDO [music video for Aguaje Ensamble] by Ebony Bailey, 2020, 4 min 27 sec
Open Call for Group Project and Screening Proposals
Sin Cinta Previa + Chuquimarca
Sin Cinta Previa and Chuquimarca are looking to give exhibitions, screenings, and programming opportunities for artists and curators that focus on contemporary art, visual knowledge, and moving images through a Native, Caribbean, and Latinx context. This open call is for group projects and screening proposals. This open call is partially funded by the Propeller Fund 2019 grant.
Proposals are considered for the June to November 2020 programming of Sin Cinta Previa and/or Chuquimarca. Exhibitions and screenings will take place at Chuquimarca. There is no submission fee. Proposals must work with the Native, Caribbean, and/or Latinx contemporary art and cultural discourse. The reviewers for this open call are Santiago X, Giselle Mira-Diaz, Malia Haines-Stewart, Jose Luis Benavides, and John H. Guevara.
Group Project:
The group project proposals aims to fortify collective conversation and commonality between multiple discourses by offering exhibition and programming opportunities at Chuquimarca. Group project proposals are only open to Chicago-based applicants. A group project proposal is considered to be one proposal with 2-4 applicants. Applicants are considered to be artists, makers, curators, and writers. Projects are considered to be exhibitions, performances, and off-site installations. All art mediums and disciplines are eligible. A maximum of 4 project proposals will be accepted. Each applicant in accepted group project proposals will receive an honorarium of $100 to offset production cost. Including a writer to write an essay on a submitted project is highly encouraged. Including programming (artists talk/workshops/lunch and learn) is also encouraged.
Screenings:
The open call for screening proposals aims to provide time and space for moving image makers to screen work and to connect video production with different visual art disciplines as part of the program series Sin Cinta Previa. This open call is for Chicago based, national, and international artists that work with moving images. Moving image is considered as a broad range of styles including video-art, video for installation, GIFS, net art, new media, experimental film, animation, music videos, experimental broadcast, performative video, cinema verite, and avant-documentary practices. Consideration for traditional film/cinema and narrative shorts will be limited but genre bending and third wall breaking films are encouraged. $100 honorarium will be given to accepted artists. Submissions will be considered for group screenings and/or solo screenings. Video artists who engage with installation, performance, sculpture, photography, fibers and new media are highly encouraged to apply.
Submission Instructions:
Please submit all materials to info@chuquimarca.com with the subject line “SCP+C Project Proposal 2020”.
Please include the following information with proposal submissions:
For Group Project submissions:
Project’s title and description/curatorial statement
Sin Cinta Previa + Chuquimarca (SCP+C) – is a Propeller Fund 2019 awarded proposal project. The project proposal was between a video-art series (Sin Cinta Previa) and library project space (Chuquimarca) aiming to create visibility, place and discussion with and for Native, Caribbean and Latinx artists in Chicago.
Blurring the lines between ciné club, reading room and art space, Sin Cinta Previa + Chuquimarca(SCP+C) is a collaboration between a video-art series, project space and growing library creating visibility, place and discussion with and for Native, Caribbean and Latinx artists in Chicago. SCP+C offers and seeks exhibitions, performances and screenings through open calls while also pulling from within its community of Chicago-based artists, cultural workers and thinkers. SCP + C manifests opportunities to bridge our local contemporary art dialogue with artists and audiences nationally and across the Americas. Through our collaborative curatorial effort, SCP+C fights against the constant invisibility and forced cultural amnesia targeted against our diasporas by showcasing and celebrating the work of our peers and contemporaries.
Join us for dinner and a screening with video-artist, curator and educator Jose Luis Benavides to discuss the intersections of social justice, visibility and representation at the heart of his Latinx and queer video-art and experimental film screening series, Sin Cinta Previa. Having hosted events across Chicago and programming recently in Mexico City, we’ll sample some of the video-art, history and artists the series has presented over the past 10 screenings this year.
Benavides will serve his abuela’s special recipe of Albondigas (Mexican meatball soup), vegetarian arroz con gandules (Puerto Rican rice) for the non-meat eaters and his specialty Cuban black beans w/ white rice, plus salad and empanadas!
The dinner will start at 5PM, please arrive on time. RSVP here. Fri. Nov. 1, 2019 5-7pm Justice Hotel - 6018NORTH 6018 N Kenmore Ave, Chicago, Illinois 60660
This event is sponsored by the support of filmfront with additional support by the Chicago Community Trust. ——————————————————–
SIN CINTA PREVIA: Latin(a)x & Queer Archive Video Series is a screening and discussion series which archives the work, voices and experiences of Latin(a)x, Latin American, Caribbean, feminist and queer video artists and experimental filmmakers from South/Central and North America. With a special interest in video artists and filmmakers from the 1960s to the 1990s, Sin Cinta Previa redresses the invisibility of Latinx, queer and women’s historic contributions to political and artistic resistance. This series focuses on vital works of empowerment and thoughtful evocation from the Western Hemisphere and reminds us that Spanish is spoken predominantly in this half of the world. www.sincintaprevia.com
This past June 3-27, 2018 Sin Cinta Previa kicked off its inaugural, seven event program screenings at Comfort Station as part of the Art Leaders of Color Network, POWER Project. Several of these events were sponsored by the Video Data Bank. Recently Sin Cinta Previa has partnered with micro-cinema filmfront in Chicago for several screenings and looks for further partnerships across the hemisphere and the world.
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Justice Hotel at 6018NORTH is a 5-room hotel created in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Biennial from September 18, 2019 to January 5, 2020.
We invite you to “check in” to justice. Developed with a collective of ALAANA concierge-curators, the communal hotel’s programming (included in the stay) consists of conversational dinners, performances, and healing services.
