Letters for a Future Passenger It is an installation based on an interview with Ismail M, a Tunisian migrant who attempted to cross to Europe five times before obtaining a visa. The project uses drawings and traditional calligraphy to present his personal narrative.

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. The work produced by Floating Lab Collective is included in several relevant books including: “Scream at the Economy” by Floating Lab Collective in Global Activism Art and Conflict in the 21st Century edited by Peter Weibel, Roulotte:09 Magazine, and This is Not a Museum. Mobile Devices Lurking, edited by ACM associació per la cultura i l’art contemporani, 2011 Barcelona, Spain.

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.

 Things we lost in the Fire were initiated by a fire that consumed the house of my parents in the south of Chile. Facing the fire that night, my parents were witness and victim at the same time, as the fire acted as a catalyst, bringing to the forefront the consciousness of our own mortality and transitoriness, as grief does. The event of the fire was accompanied by an intense reflection, awakening numerous memories and perhaps signaling the search for new meaning.  The project, Things We Lost in the Fire, deals with grief as a vital part of our very human life, an experience that can open compassion and maturation, giving our lives and practice depth and humility. The present moment proposes a similar instant of reflection on things that we lost during the pandemic process, a moment of grief. 

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