ICE OUT OF LA, 2025, 4:30, digital video, color
The hour of liberation is near, 2025, 24:07, digital video, b&w
Two of my works, ICE OUT OF LA and The hour of liberation is near, were featured as video installations in the group exhibition “El común zapatista in the face of the storm: Encounter of resistances and rebellions against fascism” during Enero Zapatista at Centro Cultural de la Raza on occupied Kumeyaay Land. Below are some images from the exhibition:
Algún día caerá, 2022, 15:33, digital video, color
Cruces, 2024, 3:15, digital video, b&w
Two of my video works, Algún día caerá and Cruces, were featured as part of the group exhibition “Anti-Border Futures” at Centro Cultural de la Raza on occupied Kumeyaay Land. Below are some images and text from the exhibition:
“We face a day-today reality where border walls and immigration checkpoints have long structured the parameters of a national-territorial, border-centered, global, interstate system/regime set on producing precarity and deportability in the service of political and economic elite bent on maximizing profit margins on the backs of racialized/gendered working-class communities. We are seeing such parameters “erode” as the logic of policing that it rests upon is being extended in previously unimaginable ways, including into our most intimate of spaces. There are no “safe spaces” under encroaching fascism, not simply because the term triggers fascists, but because the raison d’être (reason of being) of a bordering and policing colonial logic is to contain and control. In a world turned upside down, such approach to control, ironically rests upon breaking past “borders” or limits of the unimaginable, crafting new rationalities and technologies of power and surveillance, expanding the imagination of domination, however paradoxical it may sound. Yet, its purpose is to freeze and contain our own imaginations, our own dreams and yearnings for freedom, liberation, autonomy and self-determination.
However, one crucial element that all totalitarian and fascist encroachments and aspirations always undermine is the creative spirit that undergirds and sustains all life forms, both in their resistant modes and generative forms. Understood another way, no matter the oppressive logics and practices that seek to impose a monotone, monolithic existence, the raison d’être (reason of being) of los/las/les de abajo is to create, in multifold ways—artistically, politically, spiritually, and materially—that foreground what many communities call the beauty way. Let us dream, imagine, envision and bring to fruition the process of manifesting and actively creating alternative futures that challenge existing structures, norms, borders, and dominant narratives that seek to contain our freedom, our bodies, our feeling/thinking, our creative spirit. In sentipensandoser (feeling-thinking-being) an anti-border “future” into existence, in ways that defy the past-present-future triad that defines the West, the dominant order, the current structuring and bordering of nation-states, and the future-oriented/orientalism of modernity/coloniality, let us shift beyond equally constraining prescribed futures “over there” to be the rupture(s), the unbound, the at-once potentiality and always becoming that continues to transform.”
“X”, Digital Photograph, 2022
My photograph “X” (2022) was featured in the international exhibition “Horizonites” curated by Chantelle Mitchell & Jaxon Waterhouse at Post Office Projects on Kaurna Land in historic Port Adelaide, Australia. The show ran from February 4 to March 1, 2023 and featured photography submissions from all over the world. My photograph documents the border wall divide between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez with noted “X” monument to the Mexican people marking the division of the cities.
Below is some text from the show:
“It is said that there was once a poem that divided a people. Whilst it was nothing special, although certainly nothing derivative, the verse cleaved a community in two. For some who heard it, the poem instilled a sense of awe or wonderment at the horizon — the scant layer of haze where land and sky merged in the farthest distance. They saw in this woozy line a new land, a plain of potentiality. Their critics, however, decried them for their rejection of the actual plains in favour of a land that was illusory. It is said that this schism continues to reverberate, and is the basis of the distrust those who live in the interior of the continent have for those who occupy the edges.
Horizonites emerges from our interest in the devotion that underpinned this conflict and the way in which time, planetarity and connectivity tangle themselves about the horizon line – that ever-present bisection of space that informs much of our existence. The Horizonites are a fictional faction, brought to life by author Gerald Murnane in The Plains (1982). This novel unfurls amidst the oppressive heat of the inland and the rustle of yellowing brush spreading out across paddocks and landscapes. Murnane’s prose captures the diffuse, shifting and obsessive qualities of the horizon, telling the story of those who seek some way in which to understand, and capture the horizon. This exhibition brings together works submitted by photographers from across the globe, realising an archive from a multiplicity of horizons distributed across time and space. Horizonites is an attempt to manifest the horizon; inviting, inscrutable and ineffable.”
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