edgar/Endress

My research and art practice has been centered on five major areas that I have been developing in parallel.

Broadly, my art process is centered in a strong conceptual research frame where material and forms appear as consequences of the idea, with a strong entanglement in the socio-cultural context where the project takes place.  Influenced by Richard Schechner’s concepts of environmental, in situ, or contextual theater, my art seeks to transit between “impure life”—like public events and demonstrations—and “pure art,” or traditional theater. It is in this constant transiting between ‘impure’ and ‘pure’ art forms where I find aesthetic and conceptual inspiration.  In addition, the ideas of Conceptualism in the Latin American context, as described by Luis Camnitzer in the 1960s and 1970s, have informed my work.  In this approach, art is liberated from the institutions and dominance structures that easily commercialize it—instead addressing social needs through politics, poetry, and pedagogy. Last but not least, my Latino identity—as I have established myself in the US—serves as a root and influence throughout all layers of my work. 

Specifically, my research and art practice has been centered on five major areas that I have been developing in parallel, and that influence one another:

1. Syncretism and Mestizo Baroque in the Andes region.  

I examine the surface tension between power and resistance; where cultural production emerges as a response to the cultural clash of a colonial system imposing itself onto the Americas. Of particular interest to me is the response of the Latin American social fabric to the power structures and influences of the dictatorial period of the 70s and 80s. As a witness to those historical moments, my research centers on the colonial and post-colonial tensions of religion and militarism in the region, and integrates the Mestizo Baroque as a platform to question notions of representation and forms of dominance and resistance through the mechanism of art-making,  popular culture, carnival, religious expression, and architecture. 

2. Displacement in the Caribbean. 

As a migrant subject, I am acutely aware of my position in the US and the socio-political implications of that condition. I also had the opportunity to live in the US Virgin Islands, where I  engaged with issues regarding displacement in the Caribbean and developed collaborations with local artists and scholars across the Caribbean, in dialogue with whom I produced a body of work that examines immigration to the U.S. Virgin Islands in various forms and through different organizing principles. As lead artist of the Transfer project, I developed multiple works about displacement in the Caribbean, looking at the colonial history of the US Virgin Islands. Following from that, I developed the Bon Dieu Bon (Good God Good) project that examined Haitian migration to the island and explored varying degrees of transhumance, including temporary tourists, short-term and long-term migrations, and permanent migrations. 

3. Participatory art, collective actions, and community-based projects. 

In part as a response to issues of power and the role that communities play in their representation and the dispersion of their collective voice, in 2007 I developed the Floating Lab Collective, a group of metropolitan DC-based artists with a keen interest in academic research and social participation. The Floating Lab Collective was designed to integrate diverse groups of people in different aspects of the research and creative process—students, scholars, community members, and people with particular forms of expertise—and to work collectively in manifestations such as performance, sculptural fabrication, social engagement, workshops, and media art production. The projects seek to expand art into public space, enlarging the discourse about the interrelation of art and life. Since its foundation, FLC has been a partner/collaborator with Provisions Library, a research center for art and social change.  Floating Lab Collective investigates relationships between ethics and aesthetics to develop a social platform outside the normative institutional framework, and since its inception has expanded to incorporate artists, community members, and various subject area experts nationally and internationally to focus on social practice in local contexts.

4. Media art, interactive practices, video art, and film production. 

These form the foundation of my art. I continually integrate new technologies of production, as new media is a cannibalistic medium and quickly adapts into the investigation of forms and experiments in interactivity and expanded media. I have composed a series of video installations and interactive pieces and collaborated with contemporary music ensemble In general, my media art practice relates to areas of research incorporating new media and new technologies, collaborating with roboticists and programmers. I actively participating in the maker community to create platforms for research and fabrication, seeking with colleagues in this space to activate sustainable and creative experimentation, within a social framework for the use and integration of old and new technologies.  

5. Material culture.

My interest in developing a larger understanding of material culture and the life of objects as mnemonic markers translates into a series of ongoing projects that relates to objects, economics, and materials. My research explores our social response to memory and the objects that we discard or we resell as mechanisms of exchange and value. Flea markets, thrift stores, and secondhand stores where the possession, dispossession, and repossession of the object and its transit through different experi­ences are the central components of this part of my research. In an object biography, an object can transform from an object to be disposed of into a personal trea­sure or a status signifier. The projects developed here range from repurposing discarded furniture or recomposing tchotchkes into larger pieces reflecting on ecological issues and creating new narratives with found books.