I am: New Afro-Latinx Narratives

In 1978, Victoria Santa Cruz wrote and performed the powerful poem, “Me Gritaron Negra“. Santa Cruz’s poem serves as a social commentary on race and the othering of the Black body, and furthermore illustrates the racially-motivated bullying and hatred targeted at Black people and dark-skinned people in our societies.

The poem details Santa Cruz’s internal acceptance and reclamation of her identity as a Black woman, despite the efforts of a society that tells her to be ashamed, to make herself small.

Carlos Martiel is a multi-disciplined, performance artist whose work exists in the context of notions of the global apartheid, and calls attention to the violence and the cultural, political, and economic exploitation enacted by the US and Europe against Black people.

Moreover, his performance work seeks to visibilize historical Black trauma as an effective tool for investigating and confronting the unresolved history of Black people’s dehumanization by Western societies, and to offer modes of resistance to it, often using his own nude body. 

Liliana Angulo Cortés has worked in different regions of the country seeking to contribute to the struggles of Afro communities from a collective point of view and from a critical artistic practice that weakens the structural manifestations of power based on social inequality.  

She explores memory and power from issues of representation, identity, discourses of race and development.

Liliana Angulo Cortés’ work investigates discourses and archives on resistance, reparations, and the presence of the Afro-Colombian population in order to account for the power dynamics surrounding the image, territory, race, and body of Black women.

She investigates the body and the image from issues of gender, ethnicity, language, history and politics. 

She investigates these underlying issues from performative practices, cultural traditions, cases of historical reparation and direct collaborative work with social organizations.

She investigates these underlying issues from performative practices, cultural traditions, cases of historical reparation and direct collaborative work with social organizations.

In her series, Project Quieto Pelo, Angulo Cortés documents the global sense of identity of the African diaspora via braided hair designs in Colombia, other countries from Latin America, and the US, uniting people from these distinct areas, despite their linguistic and cultural differences created by colonialism.

In her practice Cortés has sought to use photography, installation, and sculpture to question stereotypes and express the multiplicity of Blackness, countering the objectification and simplification of Afro-culture in the mainstream.

Encarnación’s work is rooted in exploring the nuances of tropical aesthetics, decolonization, and the dismantling of imposed social roles and history. 

Her work here seeks to present an Afro-Dominican reality free from imposed colonial narratives and understandings.

Encarnación connects us directly to the island and its native inhabitants, presenting us with cultural wisdom and critiques against the tourism industry in the Dominican Republic.

El Negro Detrás de la Oreja (The Black Behind the Ear) aims to enhance Dominican culture by marginalizing racial, sexist, and classist stigmas that disrupt our society.  Through a series of popular objects cast in porcelain and photographs, I create compositions with minimalist aesthetics interpreting popular Dominican phrases to depict 'Dominicanidad' in a decolonial context.

This project highlights how the culture of the Caribbean tends to be defined through the voices of its colonizers, thus excluding the rich heritage of our African and Taino ancestors.

  “The Black Behind the Ear” is an old Dominican idiom first used in the 1883 poem by Juan Antonio Alix. This series, just like the poem, is a criticism of racial prejudice when Dominicans prioritize their European or white heritage while simultaneously rejecting their African roots.

Patricia Encarnación is an Afro-Dominican artist, who explores the perception of being from the Caribbean, through quotidian objects, landscapes, and aesthetics she was exposed to growing up in her homeland.

Her work intends to dismantle impositions of social roles and biased history by showcasing their effect on herself and her surroundings. She works to decode the prejudices built by society by questioning, analyzing, and openly exposing its origins.

The series of collages, paintings, and photographs, "I am From Where You Vacation," explores the Caribbean perception as 'Paradise' and its exotification. 

The project depicts surreal scenes in a tropical landscape to showcase different realities focused on the polarized living experiences between Caribbean Locals (mainly Caribbean women of color) and tourists.

As an afro Caribbean woman, Encarnación has perceived different facets of the island historically, lived in person and from the diaspora, which allows creating visual content that criticizes colonial behaviors and structures that the region continues to carry on from different points of views.

"I am From Where You Vacation" challenges the idea of 'Paradise' and criticizes the colonialist structures enforced by the tourism industry practices, aiming to solidify an anti-colonialist visual discourse.

Alexandre Arrechea’s work comprises large-scale installations, sculptures, watercolor drawings, and videos that debate such issues as history, memory, politics, and the power relations of the urban space.

Arrechea’s mode of working site-specifically makes him explore the ideological and philosophical legacy of the surrounding context to create a more engaging interaction with the audience.

Alexandre's work of large-scale installations and sculptures, drawings and videos, work to investigate cultural resonances implicit in architecture, from design to social value, and how these impact its various readings.

This approach to dissecting architectural anatomies and spaces through Arrechea’s drawings and installations explores the possibility of the multiple conflicts embedded in them as result of the many decisions inherent in their structures and in their histories

In Architectural Elements #1, this theme manifests the visceral visual relationship between the bricks and a Black person, bringing forward topics of labor, slavery, and simultaneously, the concept of creating a home, of communal building, and of self-direction.