Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
My daily life and my affectivities inform my work, deeply. I was raised by my grandparents surrounded by their stories, in the same house that my father was raised in. I think this impacted the ways I work and how I see my relationships to places, cities and people. Collaboration and radical love are important ways of working—in my practice, love is always queer and collaboration is a process of place-making. How we define love and distinguish it from abuse is the only way to heal from a “lovelessness” that dominates so many of our societies.
Sexuality, race, class and gender is at the moment—and perhaps always has been—an issue of the state and under the control of social conditions that govern the ways we move. In some way or another this has been a concern in every film I have made. My father is gay and my entire upbringing and relationship to notions of family and “father” are rooted in this lived experience. Therefore, since I was a child I understood intimately how fluid sexuality is, and that a man married to a woman is not necessarily heterosexual, nor is he necessarily queer.
I see the camera in my films as a character from a bad comedy crime drama. She is the unreliable witness, the accomplice that gives away too much and the hostage that can’t remember a thing. I’m not sure if she ever records “reality” or if she just constructs reconfigured images from stories she once heard from someone she once knew. She records the faces of people she loves, questions about places she’s traveled to and things she does not yet understand. She accepts the fact that she is a weapon: she shoots, something is taken or lost, and for better or worse, what comes out is often only a trace of what was there before. But although these traces may be inherently violent, they are deeply important. These traces remind us of what it means to be human. They show how resistance is possible even while being embedded in oppression. These traces are a product of the intersections of place, sexuality, race, class and gender, but at the same time they show us how we exceed, bend, and find the in-between or elsewhere. Even if temporarily fictional, it can be a place to resist or expand the definitions that confine us.