As an antidisciplinary artist, my practice is situated at the crossroads of sonic performance, land installation, and expanded cinema. In my iterative works, I largely explore the impossibility of the black body, the failure of mechanical optics, and the reverb of cultural dissonance. By fragmenting my own positionality and history -I utilize familial footage, 3d animation, and land practices to remedy environmental and political disruption and to question ideas of comfort and belonging.

 

Through the examination of queer rave culture and carnival practices, my work takes on a necessary satirical approach to undermine the systems at play. In the act of reconciliation with generational and environmental trauma, I remap my body as a site of multitude, to fracture the autobiographical nature of my work. 

 

By utilizing the aforementioned Carnival practices and the exploration of the ‘failure of mechanical optics, I am able to generate modes of escape or fugitivity, while simultaneously dematerializing the ‘impossible complex’ present within the hyper-visibility and invisibility of the Black Body. To be more specific the ‘failure of mechanical optics’ applies to the innate failure within machinic production of images, present within photography, 3-dimensional scanning, and computer generated images (etc.) - as a means to produce representation. 

 

My ideations surrounding or deriving from the use of land are predominantly concerned with the effects of ‘Destierro’.’ Destierro’ is an untranslatable Spanish term that is most akin to being ‘torn from the land’. I associate its meaning in relation to the feeling of belonging, but more directly relates to environmental catastrophe, political or economic instability. I have understood and contextualize the term to traverse towards ideas of Black and Queer fugitivy. As Yomaira Figueroa, a prominent scholar in Caribbean Diasporic Studies states ‘the act of remembering and awakening the memories of home/lands, land practices, and resistance to uprooting are tools of resistance against ‘destierro’. I’m thinking about my large-scale land installations as a ‘land practice’ that engages with the historical aspects of its localities, but also as a projection of autonomy and our relation to environmental catastrophe.  

 

Through the use of my not-so alter-ego known as MORENXXX, I am able to become a presence in underground queer nightlife. This is critical to my work, because the actual embodiment of these ideas of temporality and liberation already exists gesturally within these spaces, and so my identity as MORENXXX works as a feedback loop with my artistic practice. Moreover, to get to the essence of these conversations, I place no restrictions on the tools that I employ.

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Photo taken by Sam Clarke