Queer Life in the Margins - Queer Life in the Margins
This project seeks to bring together LGBTQ artists from R.D. , Haiti, and Miami, who work photographs, video, music and poetry, and address the themes of the LGBTQ community and sexual diversity in their artistic production. With this we seek to contrast the similarities and differences that these artists in different areas of the Caribbean and their diasporas in Miami observe, reflect and reproduce in their work.
Queer Life in the Margins, simultaneously juxtaposes the works of artists from the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Miami in a project that will be exhibited in Edge Zones Gallery, at the same time there will be a book and an online festival that seeks to take the public to a moment of reflection, in which the design of a new exhibition is not tested, but rather the sociopolitical context in which the subjects operate.
Artist research, which will grow over the course of the exhibition, opens up a multiple space for conscious perception and analysis of subjective realities. Therefore, all projects can be read — in their own way — as an attempt to track reality and its impact by approaching, distancing and questioning it.
For years these artists have been using the camera lens, the brush, and even their body to explore their respective surroundings, investigating the possibilities of the medium, as well as the mediated perception of the life of queer people in these Caribbean countries, the diaspora and Miami. For the first time, their practice will be shown in parallel and in dialogue, focusing on works that have a geographical proximity to each other.
However, this proximity can also turn out to be emotional in nature, or it can be presented as a conceptual and aesthetic construct. It is not what is immediately visible, but the invisible latent is the focus of the project, in which these artists explore the possibilities of active listening and collective creation. By combining different contexts, collaborations and visions,they allow to create a new space for thought, in which questions fall on the hidden, implicit and intermediate echo.
By examining historical awareness, the proven will be exposed to new uncertainty. Not as an established file, but as a progressive reorganization, the changes will become visible for the duration of the exhibition: residences, performance, forms of hybrid exposure, talks and discursive events where the visual material will be digitized, and questions will be raised publicly. An indication that the overview is not understood as a pretence of understanding and linearity, but rather as a workspace and starting point for the exploration and re-examination Queer Life in the Margins.
Queer Life in the Margins is rooted in a historic time, in which fragility becomes visible and new forces are released. This condition has a direct influence on the reality of queer subjects, but also on the production of art. With Queer Life in the Margins, Edge Zones wants to create the basis for an ongoing discussion about life on the margins and the social and artistic needs that are currently emerging or have been in demand for some time. Forming polyphonic music, art and activist interpretation, the project brings to life all kinds of works and realities.
Artists are investigating communities against the historical and current conditions of the world in crisis, and the impact of this context on our strange daily lives and the natural environment. In the process, they seek a Community experience that evades the failures of democracy and the division of countries in unequal lines.
In a contemplative body of work spanning years, these artists have inspired us to reflect on ethical issues that have dominated the past and present of these lives, and have changed our gaze to consider the time and urgency, the delicate atmosphere of queer people and the expressive live styles. The project evolved into a continuous living file of informal and recorded images of, with, and about intimacy in strange life with collaborations on the other side of the sea, because the political margin, the social margin, the economic margin, and even the emotional margin in which queer people live and develop in their different countries becomes a single common homeland, a single conceptual margin in which all LGBTQ people live regardless of their place of residence.
More than ever, we have to take care of each other,and take care of ourselves. How can this spirit of care be a productive way of working together as artist, organizationally, curatorially? and has become a key method to deconcentrate their own curatorial authorship, and as an essential means of working together without limits or contention. Through Queer Life, Edge Zones continues to support program as flexible, evolving, expanding and sometimes messy, of residences, performances, forms of hybrid exposure, talks and discursive events. As a growing file of online readings along the way with... projects and experience of voice, the rhythm of a body, the poetic and artistic forms of writing and how these forms of intimacy can be publicly "expressed". For both the reader and the listener, we share the act of being read, experiencing the intimate texture of the voice, the pace of breathing, the transmission of digitized voice to you. Queer Life in the Margins... it is a resource, a place available to contemplate, to develop the possibilities of access, an intimacy that goes beyond our networks, and walls.