Close-Lines (2019)

Performance and installation: plastic bucket, cement, wire, water, plastic tarp, fabric, laundry basket, photographs printed on silk, nails, clothes pins, sound, duration. 

Close-Lines, 2019, is a durational performance constructing a tendedero(clothes line) as a portrait of inherited and created family, memory, and labor. The performance begins by playing a playlist of Latinx/Cuban songs. As the music plays, on a white plastic tarp, I create various pole structures by pouring water and cement and inserting a tube of pvc into the plastic buckets. Each completed pole is then positioned in close proximity to one another, and near a pink storage container, with twine strung inbetween the structures. Then, after submerging photographs printed on silk and personal articles of clothing into a white bucket with water, I hang each piece onto the clothes line. Once the music ends, and the images and clothing are hung, I complete the activation by reciting an excerpt from an interview with my maternal grandmother discussing her relationship with her queer brother and his death. 

Close-Lines is a collaboration with CaribBEING and the Brooklyn Museum. Mining the structure from my grandmothers tendedero in Güines, the installation re-imagines the clothes-line as a site for care, commemoration, and resistance. The environment is composed of self-portraits and portraits printed on silk, text, collected and inherited clothing, and sound, installed within and extending from a pink storage container. Drawing an intersection with Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall, this piece traces the precariousness and vitality of Latinx trans and queer life across intersecting borders, translations, and migrations. Underscoring lines, courses, and points of departure that weave and connect within trans and queer life and cultural production; communing and commingling.

Images courtesy of Pablo Serrano-Otero