With Daniela Ortiz

The outcome of many of my projects is books. That’s partly because I find distribution in a visual art context to be very limited. Even when a work is theoretically on public view in a museum, the type of public that museums invite tends to be very specific, and that invitation comes with intimidating language and an entry fee. I was formally trained as a painter, and that’s something I’ve returned to in recent years, along with ceramics and collage. I want to use aesthetics and techniques that people feel close to and can connect with, and that are not aligned with Eurocentrism.

I used technology more overtly—working with video and digital media—prior to 2016. When my son was born, I decided to go back to media that we think of as more handmade or manual. That’s not to say that I don’t use technologies in my work now. For example, I employed digital collage in order to build the images in my children’s book The ABCS of Racist Europe . I also put all of my publications online, so each has a digital version that can be more widely distributed.

At Eyebeam I was working on a series called The children of the communists , which brings together different moments in which political organizing has protected the lives of children. I began that series with the story of Olga Benário, a Jewish German-Brazilian communist militant. The Brazilian dictatorship sent her to Hitler as a gift, and there was an enormous effort to liberate her and her newborn daughter. I looked at more contemporary stories, too, like those set in Cuba, which has historically been a home to the children of militants from Chile and Argentina, and in Guatemala, where there are houses designated as safe havens for such children to live and study.

[2022-23 Democracy Machine Fellow] Paula Baeza Pailamilla and I knew each other going into the program, and it was really interesting reencountering one another in the context of Eyebeam. She is from Chile but is currently based in Switzerland, so she understands the difficulty of living in Europe as a migrant person: a system of institutionalized racism that I have also experienced and frequently address in my work. This year, we met up when I presented a piece of theater at a Swiss museum. We will probably do something collaborative, like a seminar, at the museum.

Being an artist is obviously completely different from being a militant. But I saw militants’ stories being repressed, buried, and lost, and I wanted to intervene in and counter that. I want my work to communicate its messages clearly and contribute to raising political consciousness around colonialism and its many violences, past and present.