Incantations / Circling the Field

Nicolás Dumit Estévez, *Ánima*, 2006 / Dusk to Dawn pilgrimage at MacDowell / © 2006 NDER

Writing has been central to my practice and to my training as a creative. In most cases, this is how I learn about the work of others, and how I get to ask difficult questions. This too offers me the opportunity to archive ideas, moments and experiences that can be visited by many throughout the years. I keep hearing the words “book, book, book, put these together into a book.” I know it is just a matter of faith. It will happen.

Note: there are many more interviews being reviewed for republication. These will be posted throughout 2025

Alicia Grullón / Glendalys Medina / Antonia Pérez / Coco López / Mauricio Arango / Ayana Evans / Jessica Lagunas / Karina Aguilera Skvirsky / Alanna Lockward / Francisca Benítez / Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga / Jane Clarke /

Alicia Grullón / and Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Nicolás Dumit Estévez: Alicia, I would like to start this conversation by asking you to elaborate on PERCENT FOR GREEN and to tell us how this endeavor relates to the work that you are developing as part of Back in Five Minutes, the residency program at El Museo del Barrio?

Alicia Grullón: My project PERCENT FOR GREEN deals with looking at climate change in the Bronx and how art can serve community. The goal is to pass a bill allotting funds from city-funded construction projects to sustainable green initiatives overseen by small grassroots organizations in Environmental Justice (EJ) communities. Modeled after a Percent for Art, the bill would allot 5% of the budget for eligible City-funded construction projects to be spent on expanding green space and sustainable initiatives in EJ communities in New York City.

PERCENT FOR GREEN has consisted of roundtables, workshops, and my planning with Bronx-based grassroots organizations for the People's Climate March. As a result, these organizations and I have created the Bronx Climate Justice Platform, a proposal of legislations addressing concerns in EJ communities. I launched the project this summer at the Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos Community College, with its legacy of strong activism which led to the college's founding. I proposed the launch to be at Longwood and Hostos due to the college's history. The bill was created through exchanges and contributions from the people who visited the gallery, conversations with Bronx residents, and organizations.

The work I am creating at El Museo is responding to the history of the museum and the current work on display. That this museum exists marks how art history and culture has been recorded. It's other's gigantic intervention. The work of Marisol and the artists in Playing with Fire and the museum are part of my artistic legacy. These are examples of moving the dialogue forward. It might even invite the question: has the conversation moved forward? If I were to change the dates of the work produced they would still be contextually relevant today. Is their strength, especially in the case of Marisol and women in art, still a persistent problem of women being placed on the back burner in the history of art?

NDE: We coincided at the September People’s Climate March in New York City. While your investment in environmental issues is clear, I was wondering how this translates into the artwork you do? For example, how is your involvement with South Bronx organizations like Mothers on the Move and the North West Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition reshaping your art practice?

AG: The nature of my work is to experiment and explore through process and exchange. I see that participating in community allows me to go further into how this is a site where issues of race, class, gender, and activism open up. My ideas come from asking if it's possible for art to transform how community and history are experienced. I want to find out if my position as an artist and the things produced from making art can impact history. These activists, like Wanda Salaman, Nova Strachan, and Taliegh Smith, to name a few, impact history every day through their work with residents, government, schools, etc. As an artist I am part of the community and benefit from the work of the activists. So then, how can I put my skills to use beyond the practice of producing an object or what we consider “art”?

NDE: You are making art and engaging in activism in the context of the South Bronx. What are the most pressing concerns in this borough and how is your work responding to them?

AG: The City has become very stratified. The inequality is desperately un-New York. The Bronx has rebuilt itself but stills struggles with history largely due to the highway infrastructure implemented in the 1950s and redlining, discouraging investment from people of color. The quality of air is bad; public schools need care; real estate development is running rampant displacing people; there is a lack of green space and community gardens; the irony of poor quality fresh food although the Hunts Point Market distributes the freshest produce throughout the City; and massive food pantry lines. There's a church off of Jackson Avenue, Iglesia Evagélica Española del Bronx, where I will be working with on PERCENT FOR GREEN. This endeavor will be done in collaboration with Mothers on the Move and Radio Diáspora, whose pantry provides over 2 million tons of food per week to South Bronx residents, and that is still not enough. The lines go around the corner twice sometimes. In my work I want to invigorate the activist in us all. The people power that we have in even the smallest action. Supporting the work of the activists and reminding people we are a community is how I am responding.

NDE: I am curious as to how you see your role as an artist and activist in the midst of so much “socially engaged” art that only scratches the surface of a given situation.

AG: Art like politics questions how one establishes one's presence in the world. How people engage together, exchange information, and take action are the starting points for directly re-structuring society. As an artist these ideas bring up many questions especially in regards to how useful art can be. Everything trying to make a true change only scratches the surface. The world needs a complete re-assessment after 600 years of the same economic values (see, take, & sell). But, if we all scratched at the surface hard enough we'd be able to gauge open and uncover a potential that would un-nerve us all and that's our own amazing potential for working at justice, caring, and balance.

NDE: Can you use words to give us one of the images that your art has generated? I am asking this while thinking of the great potential artists and other visual image-makers can have on activism.

AG: Endurance.

NDE: I would like to return to the subject of the South Bronx, a place I call home, and one that New York City uses as its dumping ground. What are some ways in which artists in the borough can advocate social justice?

AG: That's a hard question only because you have to want to be involved. Volunteer first. Then, see what needs to be done and how you can help get it done.

NDE: One last question! What is your vision for a green museum and a green art world?

AG: I never thought of that before. Well, an easy answer would be look out the window, see the green spaces around you and protect them. Protect the green spaces far away from you because they all are the same, they serve the same function. These spaces and the encounters they generate can give us an inkling at what a green museum and art world might look like. There is balance, function, and diversity there. A harder answer would be let the people build it.

To visit Alicia Grullón’s website click HERE

This Q&A was first published with El Museo del Barrio as part of Back in Five Minutes

During 2014 -2015, artists of Latin@ or Caribbean descent living in New York City’s five boroughs are offered a studio located within El Museo del Barrio’s exhibition space. Selected participants, one per session, are invited to generate a new body of work in the midst of what is customarily understood by El Museo and its visitors as an area allocated for the installation of finished pieces. Instead, Back in Five Minutes allows for any performative elements informing the artistic process and practice to surface, as well as for the on-going presence of the resident artist in the gallery to become an artwork in and of itself. Participating artists generate public programs and workshops, thus further extending the scope of “OH.”

Back in Five Minutes is a Component of Office Hours (OH), a project by Nicolás Dumit Estévez in collaboration with El Museo del Barrio’s staff, artists and audiences.

Glendalys Medina / and Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Nicolás Dumit Estévez: I have been following your work since your exhibition at Casita Maria in the Bronx, 2013, and I recall your intricate pieces dealing with graffiti. What is your relationship to this movement?

Glendalys Medina: I use graffiti as a tool mainly in this larger body of work called The Shank. Informed by Pop/Hip-Hop culture, The Shank is a type of self-evolution.

NDE: Can you talk about your choice of materials for the wall pieces at Casita Maria? I am referring to the ones using paint, nails and thread, as well for those artworks in which you transformed everyday items, like a microphone, into objects with a distinctive persona: things with a story to tell.

GM: The materials I choose for an artwork often connect to a personal and global history. I decided to use nails and thread in SK and Seen because I grew up looking at my uncle’s string art. I was fascinated by how he joined these two materials to create a new image of El Morro (a landmark fort in San Juan, Puerto Rico).

In 2011 I decided to pay homage to Seen, a well-known graffiti artist from the Bronx, so I outlined his tag with those materials. It was my way of monumentalizing my experience with graffiti at the time.

As for Mic, I chose sugar because of its role as a major commodity in forming Puerto Rican identity. It’s also a metaphor for the history, commodification and global consumption of Hip-Hop culture. Every piece that I make fits into a narrative of sorts, I often see my sculptures as a prop for an action.

NDE: My understanding of graffiti is that of a political and artistic form that thrives in conveying and exchanging messages, images and codes among artists who are part of the movement. The work is also shared with the mostly urban “audiences” who encounter it in the alleys, subway platforms, public bathrooms, bridges, and streets of the city, generally speaking. With the sanctioning of graffiti by commercial art spaces and museums in mind, what in the world has the confining white cube of the gallery or the constraining cubicle of art fair to offer this fugitive art form?

GM: Graffiti can mean many things. When I hear the word ‘graffiti’ images flash in my mind of political posters, NYC in the 80s and ancient Rome. For me, what the white cube offers graffiti artists is permission, exposure, and potentially sales, but it is essentially no longer graffiti. But remember there is a NY graffiti concept called “all-city,” which means being known throughout all five boroughs of New York City and essentially famous. And the white cube provides this type of exposure.

NDE: It is interesting to see how some of the outlawed graffiti artists of the 1980s are now hired to create commissions for businesses, or to produce bodies of work for galleries to peddle to buyers with enough cash in their pockets. I am tempted to say that this once radical expression has been tamed or domesticated, but perhaps this is all about due recognition to those who really deserve it, like legendary TATS CRU in Hunts Point. In your opinion, where is this trend leading graffiti?

GM: The instinctual drive to leave a mark will never leave us. When that mark becomes more than a mark but a full artistic expression that not only represents one, but a people, our humanity then has reached a level that recognition is due.

NDE: The South Bronx has been an important incubator for a great deal of the culture of New York City as a whole, such as graffiti and Hip Hop; two influential currents in your art practice. How else has the borough informed what you do art-wise? My understanding is that you are a resident of the Boogie Down B.

GM: I grew up in the Bronx within walking distance from the birthplace of Hip-Hop, Sedgwick Avenue. My older siblings and cousins would take me to block parties as a child, my sister went to high school with Salt-N-Pepa, and my older brother is a still friends with Ken Swift. Hip-Hop and graffiti surrounded me, but it was Saturday mornings that I loved. Every Saturday my dad would take out his bongo, congas, clave and maracas and play along with the Fania All Stars, Eddie Palmieri and, my personal favorite, Ray Barretto. I remember how I felt and still feel when I listen to Acid. Those mornings listening to Latin Jazz, summers at Orchard Beach listening to Salsa, going to the pool at Roberto Clemente State Park, getting a cannoli on Arthur Ave. And even the crack epidemic, which kept me inside the house drawing and listening to music, informed my practice. Although I no longer live there, I will always be from the Bronx.

NDE: You talk about transcending symbolic language through some of the conceptual work that you do. Can you explain how you achieve this?

GM: Take the Black Alphabet Series for example. The series is literally drawings of letters. But when I have a studio visit with someone who doesn’t know anything about my work or the name of the series, they don’t see the letters in the drawings at first or fifth glance. Instead they see a landscape, architecture, a cityscape, shapes, molecules, the universe, etc. Once they see the letter, the image is made and their relationship to language takes over. They have identified it and identified themselves in relationship to it. I am interested in the moments before and after that recognition. I’m asking, what is language, image, landscapes, architecture, me, you, the earth? How are these concepts formed and how do we identify them? I realized I can not escape language and image because they are the foundation of the society in which I live, whether I like it or not. But I can pull it them apart, piece them together, and make them mine.

NDE: I am aware that this will likely detour our conversation, but I can’t resist asking about boomboxes. There are iconographic of my generation. They remind me of the 1980s, but also of my long-term collaboration with María Alós. The last time María and I used one of these lovely mammoths was in 2008, during the presentation of The Passerby Museum in Claremont, California. Do boomboxes still resonate with the younger crowd outside of the arts, or are they more of an artifact, like the cassette they fed on?

GM: I’m not sure how they view it. At present, you can still go into a Best Buy and ask “Where are your boomboxes?” They still make them. I can say that 90% of the time most people know what a boombox is no matter their age. For me, boomboxes have been a tool to escape into another reality, an iconic image to break down and rebuild an often times beautiful object.

NDE: What are you doing at El Museo as part of the Back in Five Minutes residency program?

GM: I am inviting visitors to participate in #TagTheWall, which allows each participant 5 minutes to tag a large black designated area on a wall at El Museo with a gold marker of their choice. The end product is a group drawing marking a moment in which I am facilitating the “defacement” of a museum wall. Participants are encouraged to take a photo as the only documentation of their experience.

NDE: Are there significant encounters with visitors or with the staff that you would like to narrate? If so, would you consider recounting them in a song? My mention of singing relates to the enclosed box that you built at Casita María, and in which you sang to gallery visitors, one at a time, a song in the dark.

GM: Songs can take a day or years to write, so maybe this experience will inform one in the future. I will say that while being at El Museo I have spoken more Spanish than I ever have in regards to my artwork. I found it difficult because I am out of practice, and interesting because I realized that, even though Spanish was my first language, it is not my dominant one. The feeling of not being able to communicate to my full mental capacity in my native tongue about my art and my perspective as a Puerto Rican American shook me. . . but maybe that’s also a part of being a Puerto Rican American.

NDE: If you could create a permanent piece at El Museo what shape would this take and what spot would you select for it?

GM: I would like to create a curriculum for workshops that would guide participants in a series of empowerment techniques and which would take place in the theater.

NDE: Can you suggest how we can transcend the use of symbolic language as we conclude this conversation? You can experiment with your answer to this question. It occurs to me that since we are typing this Q and A, the computer’s keyboard can be the limit. Go for it!

GM: 10...9...8...7...6…5...4...3...2...1...0...

This interview is part of Back in Five Minutes, a residency program conceived by Nicolás Dumit Estévez for Office Hours at El Museo del Barrio.

To visit Glendalys Medina’s website click HERE

This Q&A was first published with El Museo del Barrio as part of Back in Five Minutes

Antonia Pérez / and Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Nicolás Dumit Estévez: Thank you, Antonia, for agreeing to discuss your work with me. I am aware of your consistent use of recyclables and found materials in the crochet work that you are generating as part of Back in Five Minutes, the residency at El Museo del Barrio. Can you talk about the role these objects play in your art practice?

Antonia Pérez: The plastic grocery bags I have been using become a means to express some core ideas within my personal value system-certainly with regard to environmental issues and mega-consumerist packaging and lifestyles, but also using transformation literally and metaphorically as a catalyst for thinking about ideas of beauty, labor, the intrinsic value of objects, and our perceptions of everyday objects. I have been collecting and crocheting used plastic bags for a number of years now. I also collect many other objects that most would consider trash, but that I see as objects to be used in making my art. Partly, the determination to use these objects came from my thinking about how much we, as consumers, waste materials. There is an over-abundance of re-usable trash. In 2004, when my accumulation of plastic bags had become so big that they no longer fit under my sink, I took them out and sorted them into what turned out to be a full spectrum of color. It was a pivotal point for me as I decided to make the bags a primary medium for my work. I had been crocheting garments all my life and after working with the plastic bags for a while, the choice to crochet them seemed a natural way to proceed. I felt there was a certain poetry in using such a humble material with a technique that is also considered quite humble, both in the world of needlework and in the art world in general.

NDE: Are there any specific histories and stories behind the objects that you use for art making purposes?

AP: I grew up in a household with a father who taught us not to waste things. He was a child during the Mexican Revolution and went through years of deprivation. To him every piece of string and paper bag was valuable, had a use and was meant to be saved until needed. In our household, broken things were not thrown away, but fixed. He could fix just about anything. This attitude of conservation is an integral part of my makeup so it is natural that I save, preserve and collect many kinds of objects as materials for making art. The objects that I collect have suggested themselves to me in the normal course of every day life. For example, I have seasonal allergies and during those times I use a huge number of tissues. I noticed at one point that there were quite a few empty tissue boxes at home and decided that I would begin collecting them to make some sculpture. I had an artist residency in a public school where in each classroom every student contributes one box of tissues for the term and asked the schoolteachers to save the empty boxes for me. As the boxes accumulated, I began to see that their designs were changing over time and many of these images mimic different types of textile design, which is one of my interests. The designs that different families chose intrigued me as well; they were very different from the ones I would pick and it was evident that people are making aesthetic choices when they buy tissues. This takes me back again to ideas about marketing and consumerism.

NDE: What is your relationship to objects beyond your artistic work and as part of your day to day?

AP: I tend to keep things for a long time, trying to preserve the objects I use in good condition. I like things that are made of natural materials and that are hand made. I like functional objects, but also objects to which I have an emotional connection, such as small tools that my father had in his machine shop or little toys my sons used. I can appreciate new things if they are well made and beautifully designed, but I am more attracted to the beauty of old things. And I feel I can see beauty in things that others might regard as past their time.

I also collect and save such things as old tablecloths, towels, curtains, sheets and clothing. I am interested in the textiles as objects that retain the history of their use. Sometimes that is visible in the way they have been worn out with faded spots, rips and stains. The textile designs themselves are historical and cultural representations. I have used these things in my art, but I was collecting them for a long time before I thought of using them for that purpose.

NDE: Many of us in the so-called developed world, a term that I find problematic, are engaged in a reckless relationship with consumption. There is a constant push for one to shop, to spend, and to waste so that more and more stuff can be produced and sold. How can the arts and artists break away from this destructive pattern and perhaps propose and envision ethical approaches to creativity? I know that artists like Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens are pioneers in the burgeoning field of sexecology. Annie and Beth are getting married to snow, clouds, and the earth.

AP: I love that Annie and Beth are formalizing a relationship that we, as living beings, all have with the natural world whether we recognize it or not. Intrinsic to the marriage relationship is love and respect. I think that art and artists have an opportunity to point out ways that we may commit ourselves to a healthier relationship with the natural world through our work and through the example of our behavior. In challenging the white male-dominated status quo, many feminist artists include environmental concerns as part of their ideology. A number of artists are using performance and social interventions to that end. A good example is the number of artists participating in the upcoming People’s Climate March and related activities. Also more and more artists are using discarded and found objects to make their work rather than buying new materials. In teaching art to young people and art students, we have the opportunity to impress upon them to consider the impact of what they create on the world around them. We can also teach them how to repurpose materials and to avoid using toxic materials. This attitude of shopping, spending and wasting is taught from a very young age and we can only counter it with teaching other ways of thinking. I am inspired by artists who feel a sense of responsibility to society and to the earth.

NDE: This is more of a comment than a question. There is a compelling reference to objects in Gabriel Garcías Márquez’s film The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother. During one part of the film an older woman tells her granddaughter to make sure to put the dishes she is washing where they belong, because when one does not put objects in the place they are meant to go, they suffer. More than anthropomorphizing objects I am thinking about the energies their previous owners imbue them with. Any thoughts about the transformation of these energies through the crocheting you do?

AP: I certainly believe that our thoughts and attitudes about objects have energy and that this energy attaches to these objects. Through transformation I aim to make objects that are beautiful. Part of the transformation is the change from rejection to appreciation. I have thought intermittently about the people who give me their bags. I am interested in the types of bags they give, which tells me a little about their shopping habits. A collection of bags from one person is somewhat biographical. But, mostly the bags have been only used for a short trip from the store to home where they end up accumulating in a closet or thrown in the trash. I don’t feel that they have much of their temporary owners attached to them. On the contrary, they and we suffer when they end up in the landfill and the waterways—the places they are not meant to go. I also feel that in general, people do not recognize their beauty until I put them through the transformation of becoming art.

NDE: You have an interesting background. I recall you mentioned how your family can trace its roots to different parts of the world: Mexico, Vietnam, the United States, Hungary, New Zealand, and Morocco. How do you weave all of these cultures, metaphorically speaking?

AP: Having familial connections to a number of countries and cultures means that I am able to understand, appreciate and respect a range of ways of being and thinking. Understanding, appreciating, and respecting people who are different from us, to me, is the key to being a pacifist. It also brings us closer to knowing how much we are the same.

NDE: What about the division of labor? Many of us are so conditioned to relate manual work of the kind you do to women. I do know that needlework transcends gender binaries. Do you find yourself having to defy-work related preconceptions?

AP: I developed my love of needlework through my relationships with my Hungarian-American grandmother and my elder female Mexican cousins and part of my choice to use crocheting as a technique for making sculpture is out of respect for them, and in recognition of their artistry. All of them made needlework textiles at a very high level. But my choice also grew out of a desire to challenge certain received notions: such as the one that says women who use craft to make utilitarian objects are not artists, or the one that values artists who write instructions and make blueprints for fabricators and machines to produce their work over artists who make work by hand. The irony in your question for me is that so often when a man uses crochet or embroidery to make his art, he gets a lot of attention for the ‘novelty’ of his technique. But when a woman uses needlework, she is regarded as a craftsperson (read: not artist) or an essentialist. Even though I am using a labor-intensive needlework process to make objects, embedded in that process, are some powerful ideas. I would say that I am using the visual aspect of the work to draw the viewer into considering not just the work’s aesthetics but also the underlying ideas about labor, value, the environment, consumerism and other artists’ work. I find that pre-conceptions about my work come less from the visitors to El Museo and perhaps more from some sectors of the art establishment.

NDE: I can imagine that your work in the galleries of El Museo is eliciting the curiosity of those who visit them. Can you narrate some of your exchanges with museum goers and with the staff that cares for the artworks in the space?

AP: It’s been really thrilling for me to have so many interesting conversations with El Museo’s visitors. There have been tourists from other countries, from other parts of this country and also people from this city, even from the surrounding neighborhood and also summer camp groups and students of all ages. Most visitors are curious to know what I am doing and so many have expressed pleasure at the opportunity to talk with an artist in the process of making work. They have a lot of questions. They have all wanted to touch the piece I am working on. Just about everyone has reacted with surprise that the material I am using is plastic bags. Even when I show how I cut and crochet them, they point to the other works on the wall and ask what material I used for them. Some even question the piece I am actually working on because, as the plastic is crocheted, its visual aspect is so transformed that it appears to be straw or some other natural fiber. Many visitors have been excited about my repurposing the bags and are supportive of the message I am trying to communicate with this work. Other crocheters have introduced themselves to me as well and have been encouraged to use plastic bags too. I have also had many great exchanges with the staff in the galleries. They too have expressed curiosity about my work and are happy to have an artist working in front of them and talking to them, not just about the art, but about everything.

NDE: Your studio is not far from some of Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s pieces. What do you have to say about working in proximity to the artworks in the galleries?

AP: For me there is a delicious synchronicity in this because of my past connection to Raphael. I brought in some small works to put on the wall of my studio, which is perpendicular to the wall displaying his two feathered pyramids. The colors in my works and in his two pieces are so similar in hue and intensity, and with the positioning of the two pyramids pointing in the direction of my work, they form a visual link in the gallery space that happened without any pre-planning. When I was a student at the High School of Music and Art (now called La Guardia School of the Arts), Mr. Ortíz, as I knew him then, was a substitute painting teacher for my class a number of times. He was an imposing figure whose critiques of my painting at the time left a lasting impression. I never saw him or had contact with him after that period so that now I feel we have come full circle with me working in the museum that he founded.

NDE: Do you have any questions for me or would you like to add anything to our conversation?

AP: I wanted to say that this experience has opened up my work in unexpected ways through the interaction with the public. I don’t generally have much exchange of ideas with people who are not artists or in the arts education community. It was eye opening to realize how many kinds of people appreciate art and artists and also to know that so many are thinking about the environment. Many of them express powerlessness to do anything about it. I have had the opportunity to say to many, that their small actions, such as using their own bags instead of taking single use bags at the store, do have a powerful effect. So, thank you so much for this opportunity to grow!

This interview is part of Back in Five Minutes, a residency program conceived by Nicolás Dumit Estévez for Office Hours at El Museo del Barrio.

To visit Antonia Pérez’s website click HERE

This Q&A was first published with El Museo del Barrio as part of Back in Five Minutes

Coco López / and Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Nicolás Dumit Estévez: Coco, can you discuss the relationship between the concept of your residency at El Museo del Barrio, that of a reinterpretation or re-reading of the work of Frederick Douglass Pictures and Progress by a group of your peers, and that of the place where you father lived, the Frederick Douglass Houses in Manhattan?

Coco López: Frederick Douglass Houses is situated in the Manhattan Valley neighborhood of Manhattan. When my father passed away late last year it became a site that drew me in further. During my residency at El Museo I passed along Frederick Douglass’s speech Pictures and Progress to friends and artists who live in the Uptown area. In this way the concept of Frederick Douglass as a person was also solidified as a place. There are a few statues of him on the Upper West Side, an avenue named after him, and numerous buildings with his name.

NDE: Did you live in the Frederick Douglass Houses? I recall passing them, as I often traveled from the subway station on Park Avenue to my place on West End Avenue. As far I can tell, up to the late 1990s, Amsterdam Avenue divided that area of Manhattan in two sections, two worlds and two realities.

CL: My father’s side of the family lived there when they first moved to the U.S. from Cuba. I spent a lot of time there as a child and now only live a bit further north in Morningside Heights.

NDE: Who are those you have invited to read Pictures and Progress and what was your selection process at the moment of identifying your collaborators?

CL: I shared it with various people that live between Harlem and Washington Heights. I even gave some copies to visitors that stopped by my studio while I was there. There was no clean cut selection process and there was a mix of poets and artists who I spoke with about the project. Isla York, one of the collectives I spoke with, organized a program at El Museo related to our conversations together.

NDE: One of Frederick Douglass’s most poignant points for me is his realization as a child (as related in My Bondage my Freedom) that he was enslaved, that he was someone else’s property, and that he was at the mercy of a self-appointed master and lord. As an artist, what is your rereading of his compelling Pictures and Progress?

CL: I was attracted to his views on image-making and perception. He described humans as the only picture-making animal. I was intrigued by this idea of our animality being tied to machinery and the mimetic quality of picture making. Douglass was photographed quite often, and his take on our photographic obsession is pertinent in this contemporary moment.

NDE: Can you talk about the work that you developed in your studio, within the galleries of El Museo del Barrio, and as part of Office Hours? How did the presence of Frederick Douglass manifest itself in this space?

CL: The work I developed during my time as part of Office Hours is tied to perception and representation. A mural based on one of Adrian Piper’s philosophical teaching tools on the work of Kant acts as a seemingly didactic anchor in the center of the space. A mural of a hashtag or number sign rests on the adjacent wall. The third part of my work at El Museo is a series of drawings on plexiglass that quote the Friday Foster comic series. All the work incorporates organic juice I made myself to use as a drawing tool.

NDE: What is the meaning of the elements that your piece encompasses?

CL: The work is tied to understanding how race is used as a medium that we see things through. The Friday Foster character, written by Jim Lawrence and illustrated by Spanish cartoonist Jorge Longaron, was the first character depicting an African American woman to headline a syndicated comic strip in the States. The character who was first introduced in 1970 is a photographer’s assistant turned model who was raised in Harlem. She is derived from Daniel Defoe’s character Man Friday from his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. Friday is taught English and converted to Christianity as Robinson Crusoe’s servant. I was drawn to the notion of Friday as a loyal companion in relation to its later meaning of being an assistant. In contrast to this character there is Piper’s illustration of the empirical self, a generalized human form. Here the idea of creating the subject through images is tied to technologies of power. My use of organic materials to make this work is related to a growing obsession with healthy active bodies and how the economics of organic food act as a class divider. Both the Frederick Douglass Houses and programs that promote healthy eating are part of the same system of social engineering. They seek to normalize the population in order to keep it productive.

NDE: What are the responses your work and your steady inhabitation of the gallery elicit from those who visit El Museo or work for this organization? I saw several people enter your space and talk with you.

CL: Most people were curious to learn more about what I’m working on in the space. Institutions like El Museo del Barrio and the Studio Museum in Harlem are of the utmost importance to me as an artist of Caribbean descent. Working here brought me back to the same neighborhood I went to high school in. Now, as a recent M.F.A. graduate, the support I received from both people who work at El Museo and its visitors truly helped push me.

NDE: How has working in the context of a museum gallery shaped your process? Most people, maybe less so than before, expect to come to a museum to look at finished artworks. In your case, they caught you “red-handed,” in the act of making art.

CL: Making work became a performatic operation. It was a step beyond installing a work due to the experimental nature of being in one’s studio as opposed to producing a piece that has already been planned ahead. It also allowed me to think of ways of making that would fit within the strict regulations of being in public.

NDE: Were there any interactions between you and the security team at El Museo? I am always intrigued by what museum guards may think about what artists do.

CL: The security team and I were the only ones consistently working in the galleries. Unlike working in a private studio, there was constant feedback on my work. A few of us have family members that were either finishing or beginning chemotherapy and it gave us an unforeseen chance to share some tips.

NDE: Art became healing, as AA Bronson would say. Do you plan to invite those who have collaborated with you at the moment of conceiving An Assembly: The Conversationists, your project for the residency program at El Museo del Barrio, to interact with the completed artwork in the gallery?

CL: The Harlem based collective I am a part of, called “An Assembly,” works on putting together curatorial projects. As the project expands I am hoping to establish an online presence that can archive the varying results of conversations based on the text.

NDE: What kinds of questions would you pose to Frederick Douglass today, taking into consideration that the institution of slavery, as he knew it, no longer exists, yet keeping in mind that the subject is as relevant in the twenty first century as it was when he wrote about it? It is clear to me that the act of enslaving others for political and economic reasons continues to morph.

CL: I would be curious as to what strategies he would employ to approach the subtleties of how we are all complicit in the types of enslavement that exist today.

This interview is part of Back in Five Minutes, a residency program conceived by Nicolás Dumit Estévez for Office Hours at El Museo del Barrio.

This Q&A was first published with El Museo del Barrio as part of Back in Five Minutes

Mauricio Arango / and Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Nicolás Dumit Estévez: Mauricio, it is great to pause from working around El Museo to talk about your art practice and the ideas that inform it. How does the preoccupation with violence surface in your films?

Mauricio Arango: I grew up in Colombia during a period of intense unrest. In my formative years there I saw whole political parties being physically removed from existence by the selective killing of most of their members. There were confrontations between the government and guerrillas; between guerrillas and right wing paramilitary groups; between the government and drug cartels. Exclusion and political favoritism created a very unfair and skewed society. By many measures the country was crumbling. But despite that, I can almost say that my friends and me had a more or less normal life. It is not that we were privileged in any way, but we conducted our lives as if all those horrible things where happening elsewhere; Watching the national news was more like learning about things that were taking place in a far away country. And a lot of society lived like that. Probably that is how you cope with things. But later, with more distance, I started to question this and wonder how it is possible to assimilate violence and live a seemingly normal life when everything around is on the brink of collapse. That’s when the understanding of violence became an intellectual obsession of mine.

NDE: The Night of the Moon Has Many Hours reminds me of my friend Bernardo in the Dominican Republic. We once visited the cemetery in the center of Santiago and he pointed to a grave he tends, that of a Jewish man. Bernardo took on this task out of love. As far as I know, this is an older grave and no one visits it. How did the subject of your film come about?

MA: What your friend Bernardo is doing is so incredible. If we only knew who would remember us and take care of our remains once we are no longer… I see some parallels between him and the unnamed main character in my film.

The idea for The Night of the Moon Has Many Hours came from my readings on the recent violence in Colombia. On the one hand there is a disturbingly large number of people, most of them from the countryside, who one day left home and never came back. On the other hand you have those who they left behind–their parents, brothers, sisters, and loved ones–who despite the passing of time are still waiting for them and who feel their lives have been put on permanent hold, like a broken vinyl record that keeps skipping on the same spot and advances no more.

In addition to this I read about some regions in Colombia where it was common to see bodies running down the water streams. There are many anecdotes about what took place in those areas. For instance, a gravedigger in one of those towns tells how he started to secretly fish out bodies and bury them at nighttime. He did not want to upset the wrong people and get in trouble so he did his chore clandestinely. All this information was in mind when I set to make this film, and in many ways, it is a very direct translation of what I was finding out in the news.

NDE: During our first meeting at the galleries of El Museo we briefly discussed Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World and On Beauty and Being Just. These books seem to exist at two different ends of the pole, but perhaps not. Can beauty redeem one from violence?

MA: I read On Beauty and Being Just several years ago and cannot remember its main premises accurately enough, so what I am going to say does not reflect on the thoughts founded on that book at all. To me, any discussion on Beauty requires first of all a common agreement of what we mean by it. The way this word is used on a daily basis has to do more with something that is attractive to the eyes. And what we consider attractive has to do with archetypes that different industries–entertainment, fashion, cosmetic, etc.– have imposed, without us even realizing it. So the ‘beauty’ that greets us everyday on billboards, on ads, on television, is to me a classist, racist, and very limited idea of beauty. This concept of beauty has to do more with fascist ideals than with anything else. But if one considers beauty as a state in which all the parts of a system have reached a sustainable state of equilibrium and coexist in some sort of harmony then I think we can see beauty as a horizon that is worth achieving. To illustrate this idea, one could speak about the beauty found in nature–and I don’t mean a puffy white sheep or any other cute anima– but about nature itself as a system that has evolved over millions of years, and that though all its cycles, beginnings, endings, destructions, deaths and renovations, keeps on thriving. As such I can qualify nature as something beautiful because it is a system that has reached a sustainable state of equilibrium–even though we are about to turn it upside down.

If we apply this idea of beauty to our economic system and in lieu of all the inequality, destruction, exclusive privileges it grants, etc., we could say with certainty that our capitalistic system veers away from beauty. Imagine then, what a ‘beautiful’ society could be. Or what a ‘beautiful’ economic model or a ‘beautiful’ justice system would be like. For me, beauty, if thought in this way, can be an ideal worth searching for and could indeed one day redeem us from our own violence.

NDE: You grew up in Colombia, a nation that not too long ago, was portrayed in the U.S. and beyond as living in a state of war. I was born in the Dominican Republic, where I regret to say violence has been escalating since I moved to New York several decades ago. Has living in the U.S. changed your perception of violence in Colombia and how you deal with it in your work?

MA: Coming from a so-called Third World country one has a little bit of an inferiority complex and imagines that everything that is wrong with your country or region only takes place there. How wrong is that, right? There is also serious violence taking place inside American society: School shootings–a very American phenomenon, armed crime, attacks against women, racial and sexual minorities are not a rarity. If the conditions are there, any society is prone to one form of violence or the other. So being here has helped me out at being a little bit less harsh with my judgments of my home country. I still censor what takes place there but realize it is not just Colombia.

Two years ago I embarked on a new film that has to do with death row practices in the US. These executions are another form of violence; after all, these are State-sanctioned killings. This is the first time I am doing a project like this and plan to finish it within the next two years.

NDE: I live in the South Bronx, a place where is not uncommon to encounter images, used to advertise Hollywood movies, of men equipping themselves with phallic machine guns. What is your reading of this imagery in the context of a sex-negative society as the U.S. of America, and in the context of the patriarchal world in which we live?

MA: I understand that within a military apparatus a weapon has a very different meaning than the one it is given in movies and advertisement. For a warrior in training a weapon is like an appendix to her or his body. The ultimate goal is to carry and use a gun, or a rifle, or a knife, as it if were a natural extension of the arm. A warrior should be able to deploy it instinctually, without thinking or hesitation. That is what marks the difference between winning and loosing, between living and dying.

But in the entertainment industry everything is spectacle and there is no real causality. In movies people die like flies and guns are more like toys: the bigger, the flashier, the louder, the better those movies fare. There is a tremendous disconnection with what death and war mean outside in the real world. But nothing is made innocently. I often wonder if the fact that the U.S. embarked more than 10 years ago on a war overseas and that it continues fighting has to do with the onslaught of war and super hero movies we have seen in the last decade. By making us all too familiar with the simulacrum of war and by softening the real impact of combat, these movies end up legitimizing and naturalizing the presence of the military within civil life. They anesthetize us and prevent us from gauging the real effect of warfare. And they also become the means to seduce young men: they make the fighting and being part of an army more fun than anything else could ever be. Those big guns you mentioned are baits to get us to buy a ticket, to be part of a marketing campaign, and to, unknowingly, be part of the ongoing wars, because we stop caring, we only see the fun.

I also think these movies are not alone when playing the attitudes of a patriarchal society. The large majority of the cultural production of our times reflects a chauvinistic excess. Let’s look at the music industry, Hollywood, TV sitcoms, advertisement, etc. There is no nuance whatsoever: the imagery, attitudes, and concepts are blatantly sexist.

NDE: When I approached you about the possibility to develop a workshop for the staff at El Museo, you mentioned how you wanted to stay away from the darkness characterizing the work you are developing during your residency at this organization. How far does your work push you to travel into this territory and where do you find light in the absence of it?

MA: There was a time when my own research used to depress me a lot. It is hard not to lose faith when you learn about the atrocities we do to each other. But it has gotten much better. As a means of self-preservation I have hardened inside and learned to look at things in a more objective way. When the issues I am reading or exploring get too difficult to digest I pause and try to regain a sense of balance and perspective. The feeling of being alive and the realization of my own agency and autonomy–as much as one can have anyways–are things I cherish and celebrate. I do not take them for granted. I realize they are a privilege. And this realization gives me energy and a sense of purpose that motivates me to continue. I also find a warm light in my personal relationships with my friends, family and colleagues. What would be of our interests if we do not have friends and dear ones to share with? And what kind of people we would be if there were not others to learn from? These things together give meaning, light–to use your words, to my life experience.

NDE: My friend and mentor Linda Mary Montano has used masks as part of her performances. She talks about how many of us we wear them on a daily basis in order to cope with a difficult situation, or to practice different personas. My relationship with masks comes from the Dominican carnival. Can you talk about their meaning in your work? Masks are part of your original proposal for the residency.

MA: One of the ideas I explored through the work I did at the residence was how we can easily be aggressive and violent individuals, and how we are also vulnerable, suffering beings. These are two slightly dissimilar concepts, aggressiveness and vulnerability, which I could only manage to bring together by means of using several different masks.

I selected three different masks for my installation. One is a mask used by Taiwanese anti-riot soldiers. It is a bullet proof, carbon made, hard shell that soldiers attach to their faces. Seeing a troop of men wearing those masks is like seeing a group of terrifying armed robots. Those masks have a truly nightmarish appearance. Any resemblance to humanity is removed when soldiers wear them. The other mask is part of the combat uniform of the ELN guerrillas in Colombia. I have seen them before at the college I went to in Colombia where squads of those guerrillas used to make militaristic demonstrations and ‘present’ their maxims to the unsuspected students who were caught by their surprising apparitions. In a strange twist these guerrilla masks are quite similar to the pointy hoods worn by K.K.K. members. The third mask is a rectangular foam layer that is placed over the skin of the face of burn victims. It has a few slits indicating where the eyes, nose and mouth of the victim would go. On a quick glance you would be forgiven for not recognizing it as a mask. It is the least anthropomorphized of the three I chose, and, curiously, it is the only one that is used to heal. I came across this mask when I saw a picture of a survivor of the London tube bombings in 2005. In the picture, you could see the survivor, a woman, walking away the station wreckage in company of a paramedic. A burn mask, similar to the one in my installation, covered her face. The woman’s features were hidden by it; all that was left was her hair coming out of the edges of the mask and her hands pressing it against her face.

The masks on my piece also stand for a type of violence whose aim and product is to erase singularity. By hiding the face, in the case of the first two masks, or by destroying a face, as the third mask testifies to, that which gives identity and a sense of uniqueness is gone. Those masks are like an ontological black hole.

NDE: If you could perform an act of beauty, what would this be and what tool or medium would you use?

MA: An act of love, an act of affection, is an act of beauty…love toward myself and toward everybody and everything around…

NDE: Thank you for your time.

MA: Thanks to you for the questions and for the invitation.

To visit Mauricio Arango’s website click HERE

This interview is part of Back in Five Minutes, a residency program conceived by Nicolás Dumit Estévez for Office Hours at El Museo del Barrio.

This Q&A was first published with El Museo del Barrio as part of Back in Five Minutes

Ayana Evans / and Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful: It is good to reconnect with you after fifteen years. We met at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, while getting our MFAs. You were studying painting and I was in the craft department. We both studied performance art with Coco Fusco. How would you say your time with Fusco might have influenced your current art practice?

Ayana Evans: At that time the thought of performing terrified me so much that I don't think I learned any technique from Coco. I was too scared to pay attention to that because she was encouraging us to DO IT... I didn't want to do that. I was extremely self-conscious when it came to my body then. However, she taught the history of performance art with such detail and thought that I was fascinated by it even then. She made it a comfortable concept for me. Coco also introduced me to Lorraine O'Grady at that time because I wanted to write a paper on her. Lorraine and I are still in touch. Lorraine's work is a huge influence on my current work, particularly Operation Catsuit.

I should also say that knowing Coco made the idea of being a Black performance artist seem like a normal thing to me. It was much later that I realized how many people view it as something that women of color don't do. In the end, without Coco's class I probably wouldn't be making the work I make now.

NDER: The Philadelphia of the late 1990s was an obviously segregated place. I recall the journey from Center City, with its Betsy Ross-like cute little houses and the contrasting scene that North Philly provided, with row after row of neglected buildings and clear signs of economic and racial oppression. Can you talk about the subject of race in your work? It seems that so little has changed in our country.

AE: Race in my work... oooh... that's a BIG question! Well, firsts let me say that I think no matter what, because I am performing through a Black body, the work is ALWAYS about race, even when it's not "about race," it's about race. Some of my pieces tie into questioning racial dynamics directly (Like Operation Catsuit) others do not (Stay With Me). I think that for me it is important to talk about race because, being from the Southside of Chicago, I grew up in a segregated environment and also in a environment with a lot of Black pride, Black culture, Black home-owners, Black churches, Black owned businesses, etc. I am very comfortable and sure of my Blackness and while I am aware that it is a construct, I am also aware that a Black women doing jumping jacks in heels and a gown for 3 hours will be read differently than a white woman doing the exact same action in the exact same clothing because of race and all the historic struggles, contemporary pain and perceived stereotypes that are placed on bodies of color. I hope my work brings some of this into question.

NDER: There is a fascination in the arts with activism. Can you tell us what lead you to performance art instead of pursuing a more straightforward path into social justice? I am asking this question while thinking about the political issues informing your work, especially in regards to the black body.

AE: I think the most effective forms of activism are teaching and protest. I teach as a form of activism. I see my art as a way to raise questions, start dialogues, and open up conversations. It is also selfishly a way for me to "get some things off my chest." Art is my release. I make things that I want to see... That is not necessarily activism. It can be, depending on what you desire to see, but it could just lead to a beautiful moment, something that haunts your mind in a pleasing way. To me that isn't activism. Beauty is important to have in this world but it is not on equal footing with teaching in a classroom in terms of social impact for me.

The project that I am now ending with Jamaica Flux is the first time my performance was equal parts activism and visual/personal desire, in my opinion. For that project I gave teens free SAT/ACT lessons while wearing the catsuit. We talked about performance art and I explained you are "in it right now." In this way I taught as my whole self not as my more toned-down teacher version of me. The idea of punishment and reward were discussed in class and acted out in push ups for lateness- I had to do them and the kids did too.– (LOL. Often we did them together), lip-synched songs, running around the room a couple times in heels when I’m frustrated... that type of thing. I explained when you don't perform your teacher is punished. Students are often unaware of that. They only think of their own punishments. I taught SAT prep and U.S. history to wealthy families for over 7 years. They paid my company $238/ hr minimum and I was paid $48 max. I did that job always with the thought that I could not have afforded this level of help as a teen. What does it mean that someone wealthy can have five tutors at once (one for each subject, and yes I actually saw this happen some times) and a student with less money and parents with little time after work has to compete with that same student for college slots and academic scholarships? In this way I see offering free lessons in a neighborhood such as Jamaica, Queens, an act of activism. Financially and mentally leveling the playing field through art.

NDER: I suggest we shift the conversation a little bit to talk about what you plan to do at El Museo as part of your Office Hours (OH) residency? I read your proposal and I have to say that your ideas for this are political as well as ludic.

AE: I am basically going to take the patrons of the museum through the steps of making a star artist. I am thinking of it more in terms of the type of star that Beyonce or Jennifer Lopez are rather than the way that Adrienne Piper is. What does it mean to craft yourself into a star? Each week I will explore building persona through different themes: Work Weeks (first two weeks will be the foundation where installations such as my selfie station for the public will be formed); Dance Week (I will dance. I will invite dance friends to perform and lead lessons, Stanley Love Performance Group, which I am a part of, has agreed to hold a practice at the museum so the process of making a dance show is revealed. The group will also give a short show– THIS is will be special.); Beauty Week (makeup artists will come do my face and museum patrons’ while I continue to expand on my studio installations); Legends Week (we have to pay tribute to the Divas who came before us in performance); #SquadGoals Week (cool people have cool friends. Stars have friends who are stars... I want to invite mine to participate, hang out, install, all of that. We will even host a performance picnic).

NDER: What’s up with your catsuits?

AE: I love them! I am embracing my body FULLY when I wear them. I am claiming territory in the room when I wear them. I am comfortable when I wear them. I am daring you to judge me for wearing bright tight clothing when I wear them. I am being myself when I wear them.

NDER: Your proposal for El Museo involves friends. Who are these people that will come to El Museo to build a stage for you, to apply make up on you, and to create a dance party with you, and how do you foresee your work with them conceptually speaking?

AE: These people represent the concept “if one of us gets in we all get in…” The crack can always become an open door. They are all people I know who I collaborate with, discuss art with, bounce ideas off of regularly, people I respect as friends and as artists. Some people who have said yes are: Stanley Love Performance Group, Jodie Lynn Kee Chow, Geraldo Mercado, Lisette Morel, Davis Thompson-Moss. I recognize it can be seen as an active statement that all these people make various types of art, are different genders, races, and ages.

NDER: You plan to integrate the work of Linda Mary Montano into the actions that you will develop during your residency. Can you expand on this? What draws you to this specific artist? The same question applies to Lorraine O'Grady.

AE: These are people I want look at during Legends Week... I haven't talked to any of them about this yet, sooooo let's just say I want to honor them and if someone wants to come to my studio at El Museo for a live streamed interview that would be awesome!

For Linda Montano specifically there is a mental pushing of what the mind and body can accomplish in her work. I really respect that. I love the idea that she doesn’t always give you a visual, but she always gives you a concept. She also uses time as an instrument in her practice. I am interested in that. Am I speaking too abstractly? In any case, I adore her work; same goes for Lorraine O’Grady and Sur Rodeney (Sur). They all work with public interventions. Their art is not contained to a gallery or museum. It begins in the world. They just show up and give it to the public like Lorraine O’Grady's Art Is, for example.

I think I am in love with Sur's work because so much of it is activism for the Black queer community through Visual AIDS. I respect that. He is constantly archiving and writing. And then I like that his form of performance can render a simple act profound. For example, in Free Advice he simply sat by the side of the road with a sign and gave free advice. How great is that?! Sometimes simplicity in art makes it shine, makes the message clearer. That allows for more people to access it. Accessibility is important to me. I have no interest in shutting out the public when I perform. I think all of these artists feel the same way.

NDER: Any ideas for the closing of your residency?

AE: I have not figured that out yet!

To visit Ayana Evans’s website click HERE

This interview is part of Back in Five Minutes, a residency program conceived by Nicolás Dumit Estévez for Office Hours at El Museo del Barrio.

This Q&A was first published with El Museo del Barrio as part of Back in Five Minutes

Jessica Lagunas / and Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful: Jessica, thank you for allowing me to sit with you during your Office Hours at El Museo del Barrio. The time that I spent at your space helped me become familiar with some of the exchanges between you and those visiting the current exhibitions.

You are working with hair at El Museo, and so I can go on and on about the story behind mi pelo: curls, peroxide, relaxers, cornrows, and the new grey strands that I am growing, among others. I want to hear your hair story.

Jessica Lagunas: My mom tells a funny story that one day when I was around 4-5 years old, before leaving for preschool, I asked her to have her hair dyed the same as the mom of a classmate. And when I came back home, I had a temper tantrum when I saw that she had the same hair as always. Hahaha! You can say that I was very hair conscious from an early age...

Most of the time, I have always worn my hair either very short or very long, probably more years now wearing it long, which as a teenager caused me some trouble with my parents. They complained that because of so much shedding I clogged up the vacuum cleaners at home and ruined a couple of them.

Regarding hair styles, I didn't do too much overall, except for a perm in my late teens, which I remember having a very weird feeling about, as I looked myself in the mirror and thought how much I looked (and felt) like a sheep with all those curls. And another time in my mid-twenties I colored my hair in a reddish-copper color that fortunately washed away pretty fast.

Since my late twenties I began having some gray hair; I was horrified by it and began pulling them out; I didn't want those signs of growing old. In my early thirties I was having the dilemma of what to do with my hair, either to start dying it or letting my gray hair grow. I knew that I didn't want to be a slave of the beauty salon or of retouching the roots at home, like I saw my mom doing every few weeks.

I remember vividly playing with my hair and thinking how thick it was, and how much it resembled thread. That moment I had this idea to solve the issue of the gray hair: I would do an ongoing life project where I embroider my age with my gray hair, that way I would be getting rid of it. So when I turned 33 years old I began my Forever Young series, each year embroidering my current age, I'm working now on the 44.

This is the beginning of my interest in using hair in my artwork, but what I didn't know then was the power of art to transform me. Around two years into the project and because the meditative quality of embroidery, I began noticing how my attitude towards gray hair was changing, until I accepted growing old and having gray hair. I totally love my gray hair now!

NDER: I grew up in the Dominican Republic where most people’s minds were colonized to worship straight hair. I am curious to learn about the collective hair narratives related Guatemala, the place where you were grew up.

JL: Until coming to New York, I hadn't heard this notion of regarding hair type as either "good" or "bad", as in the Caribbean, except for my sister always complaining about her hair and straightening it.

Most of the population in Guatemala is indigenous and they have straight and very luscious black hair, usually the women would wear it long and in a braid. The Ladino population, which is a mix of Spanish with indigenous, also have straight hair overall. There's a very small Garífuna population in the city of Livingston in the Atlantic coast, they're of African descent. I would say that in Guatemala there is not much discrimination regarding your hair type, as there is in the Caribbean, but it is more about class and racism.

NDER: You have a basket full of donated hair at the entrance of your studio. What are some of the discussions that this item is generating?

JL: Gut reactions include awe and amazement that the work is being created with hair and that I'm collecting hair, almost in disbelief. Very few people have commented or asked how can I work with hair referring to the yuck factor.

Once people realize that it is hair, they are very determined to donate theirs or not. Most of the public donates, except for balding men, or women that have short or thin hair, and they apologize. The longest hair donated was from Karen from Florida with one strand of her 60" white hair! She hasn't cut it in 30 years.

The basket collects all the hair that people donate for the project. It evolves every day as more people donate. In the beginning one person cut a chunk of hair and this motivated a lot of people who also wanted to cut a piece. Some precious donations include some dreadlocks.

The majority of the people who donate want to start a conversation about the project: “Why hair? Why weaving? How this idea occurred to me?” And although I appreciate everybody's comments, the ones that I treasure the most are their personal stories and the conversations about hair, and all of the references in which people mention either another artist who works with hair, a memory from their childhood about hair, a cultural or tradition referring to hair, or a book. I have been writing down all this information to do research after I finish my residence.

There are so many stories! Esther, the Jewish woman who happily asked for scissors to cut a piece of her wig. Barbara, Nieves and Francis who recounted their chemotherapy and how their hair was falling out during treatment. Sherene, the young African American who was so excited and couldn't believe that I wanted to use "her hair"! Various older women recognized the pressure of having to color their gray hairs. There is also the excitement of young students that wanted to cut chunks of their hair. The people who wanted to participate because they "want to be part of an artwork." Or Virginia from Mexico, who told me that she sees me as a "weaver of life." All of these stories and so much more fill me with humbleness and emotion.

NDER: Hair, like nails, carries profound power in different cultures. I recall reading Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, a novel where hair is used to concoct a dangerous hex. Have any of your donors talked with you about some of the implications behind trusting another person with one’s bodily parts?

JL: So far only three people have mentioned or asked about this. Two of them, whom are artist friends, commented way back when I won this residency two years ago: one was afraid of DNA cloning issues, the other one about Santería. Only one person asked when she was cutting a strand of her hair, kind of just making sure that I wasn't going to use it in a ritual of some kind...

For that reason it is very important to me to talk to people, explain the project, and give them the assurance of the exclusive use of their donation for my project. Also, the fact that I have on display, when I'm in the studio, the first weaving I did during my first three weeks at the residency, helps to give reassurance, and people can see the quality of the work.

NDER: How are current fashion trends affecting the concept as well as the aesthetics of your piece? I am thinking about all of the blue, red, purple and green hair that I see in the streets these days. I am also thinking about the use of wigs as a fashion statement.

JL: I have a lot of different colors, including so many varieties of light blondish hair, a lot of dyed hair, red, pink, and also this fashion of "ombre" hair—where people dye only the ends in a lighter color and the roots and top parts remain darker—, a couple of wigs, and I got a bluish gray strand from Erin (NY), and today I got my first green one from Emma (MA).

NDER: The act of weaving hair from such a diverse pool of people makes me ponder on the ancestral tapestry that you are creating. This must contain materials from every location on our planet as well as the cosmos. Any comments about this?

JL: I have been greatly enjoying conversing with the public and El Museo’s staff. One of the things that I'll ask other than their names is where they come from. And there is such a varied geographic scope as to where everyone comes from. It's fascinating! A lot of people are of Latin American origin: from Mexico, Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua) and South America, whom sometimes I would recognize from their accents (Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina); from Europe (Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Georgia); Asia (China, Japan, Thailand); the Middle East (Israel, Iran); Australia, West Africa, Nigeria, South Africa, the Caribbean (Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guadalupe). And of course, a lot from all across the United States: (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Washington D.C., Vermont, Massachusetts, Montana, Florida, Texas, California, Washington); and from Canada.

NDER: I personally think of hair as being energetically charged. How does your body react to the interactions between your hands and the donated material?

JL: I honestly have to say that I haven't felt anything at all from the hair. However, the first weaving involved chunks of hair and that made up a very personal connection with all the people that donated hair during my first three weeks as a resident, which was the time it took me to weave it.

As in contrast, the second weaveing has been very impersonal as I don't know the great majority of the strands donated, which have come from the basket. This is group of anonymous strands. On the other hand, I do feel the energy from the people in our conversations, and in the case when they cut a strand of hair I will think of them when I weave it into the piece.

NDER: I feel that although we have been talking about an art piece, we have not addressed art in a direct way. I like that. Art can be a hairy subject!

JL: Hahaha, I love that phrase! I also want to mention that other than why I'm creating this piece and the why of its significance, this piece is much about drawing and line, which in this case are done with hair.

Overall, in my art practice I like to use unconventional materials, hair being one of the materials that is always recurring. I do this to represent a self-portrait and, in the weavings at El Museo, to create a collective portrait of the community.

I also like to think of this project as painting, especially with the second weaving I'm working on, where I am combining different colors and varying the thicknesses of the lines (of hairs) to create new patterns and textures, harmony and repetition.

And lastly, I want to thank you again, Nicolás, for creating your Office Hours (OH) project with the Back in Five Minutes residency at El Museo. Without you, none of this would have been possible! And I also want to especially thank all the people who donated hair for my project, without their trust, enthusiasm and collaboration these "hair weavings" would have never existed! ¡¡¡Muchas gracias!!!

NDER: Gracias to you, Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, and Sofía Reeser del Rio at El Museo, and to everyone at this organization who have put a granito de arena to make this residency happen. Thank you to the security team for their openness to art that talks, walks, and lives in the gallery space.

To visit Jessica Lagunas’s website click HERE

This interview is part of Back in Five Minutes, a residency program conceived by Nicolás Dumit Estévez for Office Hours at El Museo del Barrio.

This Q&A was first published with El Museo del Barrio as part of Back in Five Minutes

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky / and Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful: I am glad that I visited your studio at El Museo del Barrio, as the ideas for your project part of the Office Hours (OH) residency were still shifting. Your plan then was that of photographing every building on 104th Street, much in resonance with what Ed Ruscha did when he documented Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966.

El Barrio/East Harlem, much like other neighborhoods in the city that were kept alive by new immigrants, after the white flight to the suburbs, is now the subject of drastic changes. These alterations bring to the surface issues of class and race. What does your project have to say about this?

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky: As an outsider spending time in El Barrio it’s hard to get beneath the surface of issues of race and class. In some ways my project with its focus on architecture suggests that class and architecture are intimately tied. Gentrification is both a very slow and quick process. The visibility of glass buildings and sites under construction points to an affluent situation on the horizon. At the same time, photographic excerpts of housing projects and tenement style buildings describe the history of the neighborhood.

NDER: I find an interesting correlation between materials and gentrification. This might not always be true, but glass facades seem to point to some of those changes in a community that working class New Yorkers so much dread. What are the new building materials that you are encountering along your walks on 104th Street and in El Barrio/East Harlem in general?

KAS: Yes. Exactly I mention those glass structures above because they signal new or recent construction. “There goes the neighborhood.”

NDER: What are some of the stories that you have heard on 104th Street and how are they influencing the outcome of your photographs?

KAS: I met quite a few people in the galleries who recognized spaces that they frequent or walk by often. This is interesting to me at a psychological level. How many visual cues do we need to identify the spaces we live in and with? As I left certain icons in some of my collages, one man spoke about the Puerto Rican flag and its importance as a symbol to the community.

NDER: In your proposal, you talk about the stigma attached to public housing in New York City. The tendency has been to isolate the buildings comprised by the so-called housing projects into a modernistic utopia that pulls them out of context. How is your lens dealing with what I see as a form of architectural segregation?

KAS: Photographically speaking, I treat public housing as any other building in the series, removing those buildings from the context to think about their architecture and perhaps the promises the architects made to the community. I am not being critical of these buildings within the project but I think in photographing them we think about them and the space they use on a city block and, most importantly, the many people that live in them.

NDER: I dare to say that the average middle class New Yorker knows very little about life and community in public housing buildings. There are many misconceptions that deem certain buildings as dangerous for no reason other than their looks. Are you actually going into some of the places that you are photographing? If so, can you elaborate on this?

KAS: I photographed the buildings from the sidewalks and the public spaces within them. I think it’s interesting that public housing itself creates a physical context isolated from the neighborhood. It really is a distortion of the modernist utopia that that they were supposed to create.

NDER: Please talk about how the digital techniques that you are using serve to disrupt the stereotypes that the viewer could unconsciously project on your images?

KAS: I think more than the digital techniques it is the analogue techniques of simply cutting and gluing down buildings right side up and upside down. I’m not going to say I am trying to aestheticize them but I am wanting the viewer to see them for the architectural choices that they represent. My project is not disrupting stereotypes and it is not about focusing on the abject or the poverty of housing construction. I think the project is about showing what is there–what we may take for granted or what we may not consider worthy of a photograph.

NDER: El Museo and El Barrio/East Harlem are so intertwined historically and affectively speaking.Where do you see this organization in the midst of your work for the Office Hours (OH) residency?

KAS: It’s a really positive move to bring the artist(s) inside the museum to activate the museum and promote dialogue with the public. I think it stays true to the mission of the organization.

NDER: Where do you see yourself in all of your wanderings along 104th Street?

KAS: I am an outsider, of course but I feel like I have a sense of the neighborhood. There are still signs of old New York or New York from the 1960s–when waves of immigrants settled there.

NDER: What makes your project different from that of Ed Ruscha and relevant to New York City today?

KAS: I love Ed Ruscha’s project but one feels the car culture in his All the Buildings on Sunset Strip. My project is very much from the perspective and scale of a pedestrian.

NDER: There is an interactive component in what you are doing at 104th Street, and so I imagine that in photographing buildings you come across people who question what you are doing in their neighborhood and tell you stories about their places. What are your artistic strategies for allowing this interactivity to flow when you present your photographs at El Museo, and how do you plan to integrate the information that might emerge into your work?

KAS: I allow myself to talk to people and allow the process to fill up space. Rather than try to control the project it was nice to allow the project to develop at its own pace-so I could get to know the neighborhood.

NDER: Can you name a good place to Eat?

KAS: Creperie on Lexington

NDER: Laugh?

KAS: with the Guys on 104th and Madison

NDER: Be alone?

KAS: Along the water-I mean the East River

NDER: Meditate?

KAS: Along the water-I mean the East River

NDER: Dance?

KAS: In the museum

NDER: Watch the sunset?

KAS: Facing Central Park

NDER: Talk with neighbors?

KAS: 104th at 1st Avenue

NDER: Become politically active?

KAS: Lexington and 104th, along 104th Street?

To visit Karina Aguilera Skvirsky’s website click HERE

This interview is part of Back in Five Minutes, a residency program conceived by Nicolás Dumit Estévez for Office Hours at El Museo del Barrio.

This Q&A was first published with El Museo del Barrio as part of Back in Five Minutes

Alanna Lockward / and Nicolás Dumit Estévez

MAROONING THE MUSEUM: NICOLÁS DUMIT ESTÉVEZ' OFFICE HOURS (OH)

By Alanna Lockward

Marronage, the lifestyle, ethics and socio-political organization of runaway enslaved communities outside the plantation system, has been an intrinsic component of the radical imagination of countless liberation struggles in the Americas. The interest in these transcendental yet hidden narratives is consistently gaining attention in the humanities. Its legacies and current entanglements in Afro-Equatorian communities, for example, confirm that ethno-education and marronage are inseparable. The teachings of the ancestors that have been labeled as “primitive” and even “diabolical” by state and private educational systems are now part of a decolonized curriculum entirely conceived and implemented by Maroon descendants.

There are distinct analytical and ethical implications embedded in the problematization of enslavement, the Triangular Trade and the plantation system when their factual co-existence with marronage is silenced. Oral archives are instrumental in this regard and the moving image is indeed a treasured medium in challenging this erasure.

In Sergio Giral's Maluala, the resistance of Maroons, or runway enslaved Africans, is done majestically. Although verbal, mental, and physical abuse intertwine in a symphony of cruelty, Giral’s faithful accounts show how resistance counteracts the barbarism of the European “civilizing” mission with courage and blood, supported by prayers of Islam, Yoruba, Congo, and Christian traditions. Quilombo, palenque, maniel, manigua are some of the many names of those physical and spiritual spaces where the enslaved reinvented themselves as inhabitants of a free world, creating their own rituals in conversation with their surroundings.

The following insights into the self-proclaimed Maroon artistic practices of Nicolás Dumit Estévez are also part of a recent epiphany on the self-explanatory imprint of marronage in my own mental, emotional and spiritual decolonization processes which I have named Afrocentric but were still lacking this connection with Maroon legacies.

Alanna Lockward: My first question is: why did you choose to leave empty the seat of the collector, of the private art patron in this fabulous project?

Nicolás Dumit Estévez: Your question made me tragar en seco, a saying that, as a matter of fact, does not have an equivalent in English. The closest I can get to translating this is by explaining how the act of swallowing is eased with saliva, and how there is no saliva involved when one traga en seco. The saying also implies that one was left speechless by a poignant comment or situation. Thank you for reminding me about collectors and patrons. I did not take them into consideration when developing Office Hours (OH). The closest I came to these important categories was by thinking about potential actions involving El Museo’s Board of Directors. Some of these actions were suggested by the Development Department and played with the idea of asking board members to loan personal items that visitors to El Museo could check out and wear while looking at artwork in the galleries. Board members are responsible for making major decisions shaping the life of the organization, such as approving work proposed for the permanent collection. With your question still fresh in my mind I want to publicly nominate to this governing body an artwork in its own right. This is a “piece” one can call historic, radical, visionary, or groundbreaking: the actual founding of El Museo by Raphael Montañez Ortiz.

AL: Is Office Hours (OH) some kind of a statement of what all museums in the world should become forever, or do you imagine it as only possible in the particular context of El Museo del Barrio?

NDE: Office Hours (OH) had its origins while Chus Martínez was working as a curator at El Museo. The agreement was that I would work in conversation with her as part of an exhibition that she was developing. My initial proposal for Chus’s show was to invite all of El Museo’s offices, most of which are located on the third floor of the building, to pack and move to the ground floor space that El Café occupies. El Café is a location within the building that experiences noticeable shifts of energy, triggered by the visits of large groups, or by the individuals and small cadres that trickle in almost unnoticed. Asking the offices and the staff to move to El Café, I believed, would bring them side by side with the galleries and its audiences. Likewise it would generate new synergies between curators, artists, and administrators, among others. I foresaw this action as serving to generate horizontality. Chus left El Museo and my plan had to be reconfigured due to budgetary as well as administrative reasons. Securing permissions to use El Café for months, relocating computers and desks, and dealing with reinstalling telephone lines was not feasible.

I am aware that I have digressed from answering your original question, but it is important to give you a brief summary of how Office Hours (OH) was born. I initially operated under the premise that my work would have no constraints as a result of budgetary concerns. The reality was different and one that, in the end, pushed me to work in a more resourceful direction; making do with what I/we had at hand. As someone originally from a “Third World” country, that is, an exploited nation, the work format I am describing was not new to me. In the Dominican Republic there is a saying that states that: “cuando el hambre da calor, la batata es un refresco,” “when hunger makes one thirsty, a sweet potato is a drink.”

Office Hours (OH) was conceived with El Museo del Barrio in mind. Nevertheless, I am open to the possibility of implementing iterations of it in other organizations. I do have to say that I am fortunate to have launched this project with El Museo. With the exception of the red tape that, understandably, one has to deal with to produce experiences such as Office Hours (OH), I have been given the green light to create. I must admit that I would be curious to see how Office Hours (OH) translates to other contexts. There is a sense of horizontality and comradeship at El Museo. I can’t imagine this would be the case in places where the division of labor is more marked. Experience tells me that because of my accent, racial features, and places of origin (the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, and the South Bronx), there will be art institutions in New York City where I would very likely have to assert my role as an artist constantly. I find this draining.

AL: What was the easiest part of implementing this multidimensional intervention and what was the most difficult one?

NDE: I will change the wording of your question because of the replies that this compels me to give you. The most rewarding experience Office Hours (OH) has opened for me is the opportunity to do away with some of the trappings that restrict who one is to a title, role, brand of clothing, or degree. In my going in and out of El Museo’s offices, talleres, kitchen, café, and yes, galleries, I have been able to connect with its staff at a more personal level. There have been times when some of us have looked at each other’s faces, point blank, wondering if some of the components of Office Hours (OH) were actually going to work. There is a great amount of trusting and risk-taking at a personal as well as a professional level involved in all of this. Conversely, there is a need to keep a healthy balance between our behind the scene personas and the more public ones.

As I am talking with you, I am visualizing the traditional nameplates that people used to put on their desks, and which bore their names and titles. Wouldn’t it be liberating if we could all relinquish what society expects from one, and instead list our passions and true selves on the plates I am describing: e.g.; Dumit, Cat and Raccoon Lover; Alanna (please fill in the blank) _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __.

Personally, the most difficult part of Office Hours (OH has to do with the introspective learning it requires me to do. Learning often involves growth, and true growth can be both exciting and painful. To be more specific, while El Museo and its staff have been genuinely welcoming, there are institutional protocols I must observe when implementing any of the components of Office Hours (OH). All in all, learning to listen and to communicate clearly can ease any of the discomfort that the growing pains I am undergoing as an artist, and foremost as a person, demand. The discomfort I am talking about does not necessarily have a negative connotation, but relates to the turning upside down of one’s world that meaningful art and deep engagements with life are meant to provoke.

AL: You started your career in the arts as a curator when you were a medical student. Do you see this type of work as going back to your curatorial “roots”?

NDE: Time flies! I did not attend art school until I was 19. However, before taking my first 3-D or anatomy drawing classes, I co-curated an exhibition with Arvedits Tápia Polanco, at Casa de Arte, Santiago, Dominican Republic. The subject of the show was the local carnival, one of my favorite performative, spiritual, visual and political art forms, one that has no qualms about deviating from the expected. A quarter of a century later, I find myself curating an exhibition for El Museo del Barrio (Playing with Fire: Political Actions, Dissident Acts and Mischievous Actions) and working on Office Hours (OH), an endeavor which demands a curatorial approach. Curating for me is a channel for enacting community, and for kindling collective synergies. It is also a valuable opportunity for allowing hidden, dismissed and radical voices, images, dreams, gestures, and visions to surface. Curating allows me to invite fellow artists, friends, participants and collaborators to disrupt History (with capital h) with histories and herstories.

AL: El Museo del Barrio started in itself as a decolonizing institution, in close dialogue with its constituency. Does your project aim at reminding everyone the true mystique behind its foundation, or did you have other intentions in mind?

NDE: The founding of El Museo in 1969 by Raphael Montañez Ortiz planted a decolonizing seed, or maybe more than a seed, a Molotov Cocktail in a complacent Art world that often dismisses the work of artists pushed to the margins (the Global South, the Third World, the Fourth World, undeveloped countries; you name it). In Montañez Ortiz’s words “The cultural disenfranchisement I experience as a Puerto Rican has prompted me to seek a practical alternative to the orthodox museum, which fails to meet my needs for an authentic ethnic experience. To afford me and others the opportunity to establish living connections with our own culture, I founded El Museo de Barrio.”[1]This poignant statement was posted at the entrance of El Museo’s main gallery, as part of Museum Starter Kit: Open with Care, a recent exhibition curated by Rocío Aranda. Forty-three years later, Montañez Ortiz’s words continue to ring true.

The implementation of Office Hours (OH) at a post-millennial El Museo seeks to fan the flame that Montañez Ortiz’s lit. The awareness that my presence at this organization may offer invites the staff to continue to keep their eyes/ears/mouths/pores open to the sounds, smells, tastes and textures that come through the windows of their offices. Talking about senses, one of the actions presented as part of Office Hours (OH) was Cookie Break, a culinary disruption for which Fabulous LuLu LoLo and myself, assisted by Bibi Flores, baked cookies in El Museo’s kitchen for the staff.

AL: How does your radical presence as a Dominican-York, born-again Bronxite resonates with the large group of people involved in your project: do they say something like “it is about time,” or do they assume that your Dominicanness is self-explanatory in this context?

NDE: I would say that most of the staff at El Museo knows about my origins and identities in flux. Some don’t, yet there are no questions asked about where I “come from.” I find this liberating, especially in the context of an “American” society so preoccupied with Othering and excluding. The same applies to my roles at El Museo. I have been acting at this organization both as the guest curator for an exhibition and as a catalyst for Office Hours (OH).Again, the staff has engaged, contributed to, and participated in these activities without a need to get into titles, but more in the spirit of teamwork and familia. Talking about a subject dear to you, decolonization, it has been Puerto Rican-launched organizations like El Museo that have been responsible for so much of my own coming of age as a Lebanese Dominican, Dominican York, and a Bronxite. Interestingly enough, I have been realizing that I cannot become a Bronxite without also becoming Puerto Rican and Nuyorican.

AL: Do you see yourself in the future as a “decolonial coach” for museums all over the world or are you aiming larger than that?

NDE: This an enormous task. Linda Mary Montano, my mentor and performance art guru, made a similar suggestion. I am up for the idea of decolonizing the museum as institution at large. So much of the Wunderkammern mentality in the Art world has yet to be shattered. I often dream of the opportunity to be invited to perform a good old fashion Caribbean despojo (una limpia), a cleansing, of some of the most colonized gallery spaces around. I recently learned that botánicas in New York do in fact sell the guava branches required for this ritual.

My greatest thanks to you for the interesting conversation, to Sofia Reeser del Rio for her amazing job with Office Hours (OH), and to El Museo for its hospitality. What a great place to work as art and to put art to work!

[1] Ralph Ortiz, “Culture and the People,” Art in America, May-June, 1971, 27.

To learn more about Alanna Lockward click HERE

This interview is part of Back in Five Minutes, a residency program conceived by Nicolás Dumit Estévez for Office Hours at El Museo del Barrio.

This Q&A was first published with El Museo del Barrio as part of Back in Five Minutes

Francisca Benítez / and Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful: We share a common interest in the so-called public space, which I call spaces of public use, because most of these are no longer public in a political sense, or there are restrictions on how people can actually use them. In your travels, have you come in contact with a truly public space?

Fran Benítez: Unfortunately we are privatizing everything, and the little we have left, we are not taking care of. In terms of restrictions on how people use public spaces and/or spaces of public use, it is worth asking who is defining those restrictions and how are they being enacted. Are they the result of a democratic process? or on the contrary, are they forced by a dictator, or by a democratically elected official but with invested interests in real estate, by whom? How? I think we need to be constantly participating and building the commons, because if we don’t they will disappear completely, a vital public space is a requisite for a healthy democracy.

NDER: You are originally from Chile, the homeland of artists and collectives like CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte), y Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, the Mares of the Apocalypse. Can you talk about the influence that this artistic lineage may have had or continues to have on artists of your generation?

FB: There are very interesting echoes of the Chilean Student Movements of 2011, where site-specific street performances carried out by students played a vital role as political tools for peaceful protest and resistance, bringing attention to the problems of the neoliberal model, gathering wide public support and demanding government action. Flash-mobs and other internet-era strategies were obviously a big part of it (the Revolución Pingüina of 2006 had largely been coordinated through the internet) but there are local histories of art and activism that sieve through all this, for example in 1800 Hours for Education, a durational performance where more than 300 students took turns to run for 1800 uninterrupted hours around La Moneda, the government palace; or Thriller for Education, in which nearly 3000 students dressed like zombies took over the Constitution Plaza in front of La Moneda to perform the choreography of Michael Jackson’s thriller. In one part of his book Háblame de amores (2012), Pedro Lemebel (half of Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis) talks about “la política del arte relámpago” where he describes some of the protest actions planned and carried out against the Pinochet dictatorship in the ‘80s, among them a “tree of legs”, to bring attention to the tortured and the disappeared. I see that artistic lineage continuing in the work of Francisco Tapia, also known as “Papas Fritas,” the artist who stole and destroyed $500 million worth of student debt from Universidad del Mar and then presented the remaining ashes of the burned documents in an exhibition at GAM. He is currently leading the project Desclasificación Popular, working with victims of the dictatorship to declassify the Valech Report, which recognizes 40,018 victims of human rights abuses yet protects the identity of the perpetrators with a 50 year pact of silence. I came into contact with his work for the first time when we were exhibiting in the first Beijing Biennial in 2009. Papas’ contribution was done remotely, in the form of a video and installation titled The Great Firewall. Even though he is an individual artist, not a collective, I see a link between Las Yeguas’ work and his, mainly because of his guts, integrity, humor and disruptive strategies. But this opinion is really spontaneous, the artistic lineage you mention is so strong and its influence widespread on so many artists of my generation, it would be really difficult to pin it down in the space of this interview, it could be a Ph.D. thesis.

NDER: Chile is also the homeland of Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, and a significant number of poets and writers like Alejandro Jodorowsky. Does this have a connection to the use of poetry in your work?

FB: When I was a kid I went to an “encuentro de payadores” (popular poets encounter) in Molina, the nearby town in the rural part of Chile where I grew up. There I saw for the first time improvisation duels by popular poets in “décimas” and “cuartetas.” I was deeply impressed. It was the mix of improvisation and structure, the personal spontaneous thoughts in the collective creation in situ that attracted me, more than any particular idea of national identity. I would find the same exhilarating feeling 10 years later in jazz jam sessions, and later witnessing beatrhymers’ battles. It also might have to do with poems I learned from my grandma and with my architectural education in Chile (which in turn has been influenced by the philosophy and methods of Open City and the school of architecture of the UCV)… Everything finds its way into my work, the things I see on the street, just as much as the verses I read.

NDER: I have become increasingly enamored of poetry, the spoken word and with choreography, and so I have been opening my senses to the work of The Peace Poets, Caridad ‘La Bruja’ De La Luz, Pedro Pietri, Josefina Báez, Arthur Avilés, and Luis Malvacías. Who are the contemporary poets and choreographers that are nurturing your soul and imagination?

FB: As I’ve been learning sign language (mainly LSCh, in Chile and ASL in the United States) and more about Deaf culture, I have become interested in Deaf poetry, first as a form of expression in Deaf communities, as an art form, performance, and a literary form that happens in space. I’ve been looking at the work of different Deaf poets through the internet and at Deaf poetry jams, and I’ve been focusing on how some rhyming structures obey hand shapes for example, some other movements, or how the possibility of multiple meanings works here, how some structures become recurrent (like A to Z stories or number stories). There’s a great poem by Peter Cook called Need about our society’s addiction to oil. In this poem the handshape and movement for the word “need” becomes a classifier for an oil-extracting pumpjack and from that moment on, the narrative spills out to engulf us. I’ve been frequenting ASL poetry events, attending seminars about the subject, and creating participative performances to go further into this, but I have barely scratched the surface.

A couple of memorable pieces that I keep thinking about: Christine Sun Kim’s Face Opera, in which a group of Deaf performers, including the artist, take turns in acting as a choir “singer” or conductor through the use of face markers or visual nuances (eyebrows, mouth, cheeks, eyes) to “sing” without actually using their hands. I’m also very interested in Christine’s drawings and how she works with notation merging conventions from ASL and music. There is a piece by dancer-choreographer Paul Wenniger that I can’t take out of my mind; it’s called 47 ITEMS, Ingeborg & Armin that I saw in 2009 in Vienna. Based on a poem by Michael Donauser, the story is narrated by the movements of 4 dancers (Ewa Bankowska, Laia Fabre, Lisa Hinterreithner, Esther Koller) that spend nearly 70 minutes stacking and re-stacking consumer products commonly found in a supermarket, creating space and making it evolve, conveying movement, characters, and the passing of time. The sound design by Nik Hummer is also fantastic, consisting of several mp3 players concealed inside different products that change volume and sonic predominance depending on where on the stage they are placed; on top of that there is a layer of live music with Franz Hautzinger playing the trumpet.

NDER: So much of New York City has changed since I moved here a quarter of a century ago. Are any of these architectural developments reshaping your actions in spaces of public use? I am asking because you have a degree in architecture, and because I am a stubborn New Yorker who refuses to relate to the glass towers that dominate the city’s visual landscape these days. I personally move and walk among the older buildings I so much love.

FB: Change is inherent to New York City; I moved here in 1998 and oh boy, it has changed! as it always does, but to me something that is also inherent to New York is its diversity in terms of cultures and economic realities. It’s what made me come here as an immigrant. Unfortunately more and more of the change we are seeing is put forward by the homogenizing forces of gentrification and luxury development, while low income people are ignored and displaced. And it’s not just being done by market forces, but also by top-down racist planning policies and unscrupulous politicians. I live in Chinatown in Lower Manhattan, a neighborhood filled with blatant examples of what I’m talking about: look a the recent sale of the city-owned care facility Rivington House to developers to be transformed into luxury condos (through a shady deal involving the mysterious removal of a deed restriction); look at the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA), whose promise of affordable housing got somehow lost and after laying around empty for 50 years; now market rate housing with barely a 20% “affordable” component is being built in place. We saw the city approve a 2008 rezoning plan to protect the East Village and leave Chinatown and the Lower East side unprotected to be easy prey for developers, look at the Extell tower and the coming JDS and L+M luxury developments. We are seeing the Bloomberg-De Blasio accelerated privatization of NYCHA, and now we are seeing the De Blasio plans for “affordable” housing with upzonings in many low income communities across the city, a move that will only accelerate displacement in exchange for a few units of housing affordable for middle class people lucky enough to win this lottery. It’s really terrible. If you look at the data on wage stagnation and people living under or near the poverty line (45% of the population of New York City according to 2014 office of the mayor’s data), and then compare it to the rates of housing production it doesn’t make any sense: it’s a recipe for disaster and for more homelessness.

Somehow I still have faith in this city and in New Yorkers, outrage and mobilization can change things. The Tenement House Act of 1901 started to respond to terrible housing conditions, the Lower Manhattan Expressway plan was stopped by local communities and activists who took to the streets, the demolition of the old Penn Station propelled such an outrage that the Landmarks Commission was created in response, Occupy Wall Street changed the conversation nationwide. I have been meeting people who are engaged in active resistance, in my neighborhood for example, I have joined the efforts of the Coalition to Protect Chinatown and the Lower East Side, composed of several community groups and organizations advocating for social and environmental justice. We are advocating for the adoption of the Chinatown Working Group plan, the result of more than 5 years of meetings that included over 50 community groups in addition to the expertise of two planning schools (CUNY and Pratt). The plan aims to preserve the character and affordability of the area for its working-class immigrant population by stopping the privatization of public assets and land (NYCHA in particular), upzoning some areas while stipulating affordable housing requirements above current city standards, placing height limits on significant parts of the neighborhood and creating a special district with a variety of anti-displacement strategies. We’ve been encountering staunch opposition in City Hall, where the administration has dismissed the community-led rezoning saying it’s “too ambitious” but we are not backing down. Our actions are varied, from gatherings, conversations, door to door organizing, marches, protests, pickets, participation at public hearings, community board and town hall meetings. Positive change takes a lot of work and a functioning democracy needs so much more than our participation via the ballot box; being part of the shaping of our cities is crucial. This is full of complex and opaque processes, and this complexity is used as an excuse by people in power to exclude us from planning and decision-making. Part of my work has been collaborating with different organizations to demystify those processes, to make them accessible to the people and to facilitate community participation.

NDER: With the advent of the Internet, e-mail and FB, there is a proliferation of information that feels extremely overwhelming. The more e-mails one deletes the more one receives, or so it seems. Do you have any advice for helping one to employ language in a heartfelt way?

FB: I value real time face to face interaction, with loved ones, friends, community, random people in the streets, humans in general, and nature. I don’t feel comfortable online at all. I have a hard time communicating via Facebook, it’s overwhelming. Sure it’s a place where everyone is sharing their thoughts and has a lot of potential for political action, but then I wonder how much does it connect us and how much does it alienate us, enclosing us in narrow echo chambers and collecting our data. The Yes Men are on point: no amount of clicking can replace people getting together in a plaza. I don’t think I can be called paranoid, everything is being stored and we have seen crazy episodes in history where some really dubious characters have risen to power. It is perfectly possible that some global dictator would end up in power, won’t be into what you post (or posted 10 yeas ago) and will send a drone to your home to kill you. Without due process. Oh wait, right, that’s already kind of happening. We must speak up, yes, but there are so many ways of doing it.

NDER: Can you talk about what you have been doing at El Museo as part of the Office Hours (OH) residency? Why El Museo? Why a gallery space and not a plaza?

FB: A gallery space and plazas. The first part of the residency took place this past September 2016 and the second part will be in February 2017. In the first part of the residency I used the gallery to continue my research on sign languages and Deaf poetry, engaging the audience in this learning process, collecting assignments from visitors and staff (assignment box) encouraging them to participate (brainstorming rhymes by handshapes), and inviting Deaf collaborators, the highest point being when Opal Gordon performed her History Music. The study of handshape rhyming extended the confines of my own studio space to include the concurrent exhibition, Antonio López: Future Funk Fashion, through a close look at the handshapes in Antonio’s amazing drawings, and coming up with rhymes based on them. Among the visitors was Tanya Ingram, an organizer at the House of Justice Deaf Club in Harlem who invited me to perform at the ASL Harlem night organized by the club at The Shrine, a gathering that usually happens there once a month.

Throughout my one-month residence I also got to walk through the neighborhood and continue working on a series of graphite rubbings on paper of foundational stones of buildings, starting by the two cornerstones of the building El Museo occupies (built in 1921 as an orphanage). Each rubbing bears the year in which the building was built; 1962, the Lehman Village NYCHA Houses; 1954, the Washington Carver NYCHA Houses; 1958, the Jackie Robinson Educational Complex. I have been looking for buildings that were created pursuing the “public good”, however hard to define what that idea might be.

During this first part of the residency I was also doing two projects remotely, both involving art institutions, public spaces and Deaf communities. The first one, Moebius Path, a performance in collaboration with SITE Santa Fe and the New Mexico School for the Deaf, was an evening of ASL poetry along a walk through both institutions and the park in between them. The other project, Creación colectiva: EL ciclo de la vida, was a workshop/performance developed long distance, in Cuenca, Ecuador, in collaboration with students from the Unidad Educativa Especial Claudio Neira Garzón, Estefaní Juca, the Cuenca Biennial and presented at Parque de La Madre for the biennial’s inauguration. All this has been a tremendous learning experience, and it makes me think again about the lessons from those student movements I mentioned before, interacting through cyberspace and traditional public spaces to devise new strategies and mechanisms for social change.

NDER: If you could use one single word to close this conversation, what word would that be?

FB: Thanks!

To visit Francisca Benítez’s website click HERE

This interview is part of Back in Five Minutes, a residency program conceived by Nicolás Dumit Estévez for Office Hours at El Museo del Barrio.

This Q&A was first published with El Museo del Barrio as part of Back in Five Minutes

Jane Clarke / and Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Nicolás Dumit Estévez: Jane, it is quite a challenge to think of playful ways to format a conversation about play. I suggest we talk about how we interacted with the world when we were six. I can tell you that my toys were rocks, found objects, and sometimes adult’s tools that could be deemed as dangerous. What about you?

Jane Clarke: When I was six and living in the suburbs of England, close to the countryside, my toys were also sticks and stones, soil and water, flowers and leaves. Climbing trees was a highlight; finding flint stones that could be imagined as tools to cut and hammer; using horse chestnuts on strings to compete with others to find the victorious champion, gathering flowers in the parks and woods to make imagined jewelry and home furnishings. Yes, the freedom we were allowed to have at that time could be deemed as dangerous today. It is much harder for parents, certainly of children in the city, to be able to allow their children to be independent in this way. However, the child’s need to play and imagine remains the same in order for them to develop in healthy ways. To be able to play is a necessity for children, it is not an option!

NDE: What is the role of freedom in play and what are some of the limits we should keep an eye on? Please note that I am now approaching play not just as a children’s activity, but as one in which adults engage as well.

JC: Children need the freedom to be able to think in authentic and meaningful ways. They need time to be able to solve problems, they need to be encouraged to take risks and to be trusted in this process. They also need materials that are open-ended and that can offer multiple possibilities. Obviously, safety is always something that should be monitored by the adult in this process, monitored but not suffocated. For example, if a child is being taught how to use a hammer safely under the guidance of a grown up, sometimes the child will bang his or her finger or thumb and it will hurt. That can be an important part of this learning process. For adults it is harder for some of us to return to this unbridled landscape of play; sometimes we need permission and encouragement to be able to open up to playfulness. Again, adults, not dissimilarly to children, need materials that can ignite possibilities, they need to be given encouragement and the time to open themselves to a process that may have become unfamiliar to them; they need to feel safe and respected in order to take this plunge.

NDE: Too much work and no play makes Jack and Jill a dull child. The project, for lack of a better word that I have developing for El Museo del Barrio, is entitled Office Hours, and it deals with the concept of play as work and work as play. For this I have been inviting the different departments of the organization to conceive of actions through which members of the staff can reveal their creative selves. Can work be play?

JC: Yes, children’s play is their work! Working in a progressive school that has honored this process for more than 100 years, it has been illuminating to observe the natural shift that happens for children and adults as they enter an environment with this philosophy. For children the shift is an easy one; they feel safe in the space that honors who they are and what they are capable of doing; for adults it can sometimes take longer: “When is my child going to really learn something?” Yes, I do believe that work can be play for adults also. However, the demands of the different aspects of the professional world we find ourselves in can sometimes cloud possibilities. The time pressure that so many of us find ourselves confronting in our professional lives can be suffocating; authentic play cannot be rushed, but has to be nurtured and given time to unfurl. It cannot be found by pressing a button. Being open to play can also sometimes be frightening for adults because it has become unfamiliar.

NDE: You work at the historic City and Country School in Manhattan, a place where play has a preeminent role in the curriculum. What do you have to say about the relationship between play and age? Do people tend to play less as they get older?

JC: An interesting observation for me has been the way in which seniors in our society are often able return more easily to the creative practice that playfulness requires. Somehow, reaching a moment in their lives when they do not have the same pressures burdening them seems to allow them to experience the creative joy of, for example, playing with art materials and creating something that gives pleasure and a sense of spontaneity. These opportunities can offer new possibilities in life; different ways of knowing yourself and other people.

NDE: Back to Office Hours, and the jobs we pursue in the adult world, can you talk about the different kinds of play? I am asking because I am curious about how grown ups may approach, for example, parallel play. In other words, I am trying to come up with activities we do in our daily jobs that could illustrate the different forms of play.

JC: I think almost everything we do in our daily lives as adults can offer the opportunity for play, we simply have to allow the space for this to happen. In a spontaneous exchange, for example, with someone we connect with as we travel to work on the subway, we share a smile, a look, a conversation; there can be a playfulness in this exchange. Where there is playfulness, there is always joy. As we go about our daily tasks in the workplace, no matter how routine our responsibilities may be, there are always different approaches to a task. If, for example, your job is a waitress in a restaurant, a doctor in a hospital, a driver on a bus, most often we are connecting with other people in this process. Spicing the routine with the unexpected has to be a key. There are always things that have to be accomplished in order for a job to be well done, but playfulness does not threaten the accomplishment of a task, it can simply make it more pleasurable. For example, if your work in a restaurant requires you to set tables in a specific way as part of your job, the action itself can be a routine, but what you think about as you do the work is controlled only by you. If you allow yourself to be playful in your thoughts as you work, a task can be transformed into a different experience. This playfulness can quickly extend and influence the people with whom you work. When you play with someone else, your relationship with them changes and you see each other in a different way.

As mentioned before, the process of play is not an option for children to develop into healthy beings. Even if children are raised in a more solitary context, they will find a way to be playful simply because they have to, they cannot choose another route. However, if this process is not valued and/or encouraged, it may be harder for them to lead successful and fulfilled lives as adults.

NDE: As an artist who works with art in everyday life, a field developed by art visionaries like Allan Kaprow, and Linda Mary Montano, among others, I often seek opportunities to invite people to drop their preconceptions about who they may be and what the world expects from them, and to play with who they really want to be, or the world they want to bring about. Can art be play and can play be art?

JC: There is no doubt for me that art can be play and vice versa. To play is to imagine and to imagine offers endless opportunities for anyone. The image we present to the world is a façade for what lies beneath. When children play they often create things of beauty and create connections with each other. It is through that experience that they know themselves in deeper ways. If I imagine what it is like to be someone else, I have the possibility for deeper understanding. I also have the possibility to control the image/person I am creating, therefore I can experiment with the knowledge that I am safe; I am ultimately in control of this experience.

NDE: Is there room in play for rehearsing or is play by nature spontaneous?

JC: I think we can also learn from children not only the spontaneity of play, but also the need that children have to repeat experiences in order to better understand how things work. It is not exactly a rehearsal because each time the experience is different, but the process can be practiced. For example, children are always intrigued to better understand family relationships and how the family works. They may consistently act out the same drama taking place within an imagined family in this process. Is this a rehearsal? Not exactly, there is no final show, it is the very moment of play that is significant. The experience itself, in the moment, is what is important; the memory of that experience, however, may affect how things play out in a follow-up.

NDE: How would you say time and play interact with each other?

JC: For young children the concept of time is obviously very different from our own understanding of time. In order to truly play in an organic and fluid way, children and adults need almost to exist in that timeless moment. We need to allow time for the natural engagement of play to develop and to grow, for ideas to develop and ignite, and for the ebb and flow of play to run its natural course. A hurried moment is not conducive to the seeds of play.

NDE: Can you give me and the staff at El Museo del Barrio a good reason to keep play alive, even as we grow older and our commitments become more demanding?

JC: The most important thing I can say is that the ongoing practice of nurturing our deeper and more playful, creative selves will certainly make us feel more fulfilled and, I believe, happier in our lives. Carving out time to engage in playful pursuit is important and like anything else requires a level of commitment. The experience of play feeds itself and once you have opened the door you will not look back!

Jane Clarke, Director, Lower School, City and Country School, New York, NY.

This interview is part of Back in Five Minutes, a residency program conceived by Nicolás Dumit Estévez for Office Hours at El Museo del Barrio.

This Q&A was first published with El Museo del Barrio as part of Back in Five Minutes

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga / and Nicolás Dumit Estévez

Nicolás Dumit Estévez: Can you talk about the use of firearms in On Transmitting Ideology in Playing with Fire at El Museo?

Ricardo Miranda Zúńiga: Through the amplification of mass media, ideological rhetoric is a powerful cultural weapon. I wanted to make as transparent as possible the power of ideological speech and its transmission through the media; mounting the radios onto the forms of AK47s and Uzis immediately triggers this link–the transmission of ideological speech is a political weapon.

NDE: I had the opportunity to see images of the performance of On Transmitting Ideology in Berlin, Germany. What were some of the reactions from passersby? My understanding is that people in the streets encountered you, as well as a small cadre of performers carrying wooden AK47s? How did you go about recruiting participants for your piece?

RMZ: The march was one act of a 24 hour sound performance titled Moving Forest that was commissioned for transmediale.08: CONSPIRE…, an annual art and digital culture festival in Berlin. The performance and call for participants was circulated during the festival, so it was festival participants that volunteered to be part of the performance. The march of 20 participants was from Haus der Kulturen der Welt to the public park Siegessäule with a stop by the mayor’s home. My constant fear was that of authorities stopping us, but police merely looked at us with disinterest. Also most pedestrians merely paused to watch us. Some asked what we were doing and, when English speaking, we had them listen to the audio montage. People who did so generally understood the work and were only surprised by the extremism spoken in the historically famous speeches.

NDE: There is a great deal of debate among those who advocate for guns and those who want to ban them. I am wondering how On Transmitting Ideology may or may not position itself in the context of this push and pull.

RMZ: The representation of the gun is to reflect the violent nature of ideology and if one listens to the audio montage, it captures extremism. I consider both violence and extremism as negative characteristics of society. The reading of the work that is most in line with my goal in creating it is that we, as a society, need to move away from both weapons and ideological extremisms–political and religious.

NDE: What are your thoughts about the politicization of aesthetics. It has come to my attention that while it is fashionable to make “political” work, politics are not a hip subject in the art world

RMZ: I have little interest in the art world. I’m much more interested in art that exists outside of the art world; art that engages people who are not seeking art and may function outside the gallery or museum. I’m interested in art that attempts to weave itself into the fiber of everyday culture while investigating, questioning and perhaps critiquing normative culture to stir self-reflection. Much of the exchange in the art world is to decorate the homes of the wealthy or perhaps to serve as an investment for the wealthy. Perhaps for the art collector investing in work that portrays current day politics is a bad long-term investment choice, and not the best home decoration. If the artwork is political, it needs to be sufficiently abstracted or undefined to function as a commodity object, so that any political potential has been muted.

NDE: Making political art work entails a big responsibility and a challenge as well. How can art that is politically-conscious live beyond the art world and effect change in society at large? And is this the role of the artist?

RMZ: This is a tough question because I don’t know how one would measure the effect of politically charged work upon others whom it may inspire to act. I believe that as long as the drive to create political art is sincere–that the artist is compelled to make political art due to first-hand experience of injustice, inequality, the misuse of power, it is not the role of the artist to effect change. The role of the artist is to capture and convey.

To visit Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga’s website click HERE

This interview is part of Crossfire, which was a program for PLAYING WITH FIRE: Political Interventions, Dissident Acts, and Mischievous Actions, curated by Nicolás Dumit Estévez raffle at El Museo del barrio

About Crossfire:

Nicolás Dumit Estévez asked artists in Playing with Fire to interview each other as well as to engage with him in Q and A’s dealing with their specific contributions to the exhibition or with their art practice in general. These exchanges aim to spark conversations, debates, and to plant a seed for potential collaborations between the participants. During the last seven years, Estévez has received mentorship in art and everyday life from Linda Mary Montano, a leading figure in the performance art field and a pioneer of the Q and A format within the arts. For example, see Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties published by University of California Press. Crossfire was conceived and edited by Nicolás Dumit Estévez.