Paper short abstract:

Tecnologías Deculoniales is an investigation on systematic practices of representation based on the use of archive, data, and memory as a source in the assessment of a conceptual proposal that questions colonialism and postcolonialism.

Paper long abstract:

I understand my visual practice in a global context, where the local problems (my place of residence) affect the production of my work. After moving to Los Angeles, CA, I find myself in a new conflict of personal and national identity, "I'm not American," "I'm not African-American," "I'm not Latino," which has forced me to investigate systems and diasporic mechanisms of representation in the construction of my new hybrid identity. With this research, I am forming the project "Deculonialidad," which is formulated from the lack of literacy in reading text and image within a globalized culture. With the use of archive (memory), text and image I seek to break with the prevailing discourse in recognition of the other as strange.

The research is an interest in work that elicits an embodied perceptual and phenomenological engagement with the viewer while examining decolonial deconstructivist impulses surrounding blackness, nationality, and anti-imperialist epistemes.

Utilizing archives material (literal, genealogical, and conceptual) as an interchangeable platform for addressing these issues, this essay will explore the variants of the archives and its applications in correlation with postcolonial endeavors. Here, the (in)material application of archives and/or archiving of the body recalls historical problematics including, but not limited to, social rituals of public shaming, ethnological practices, and assimilation. Functioning as the cultural equivalent of the colonialism that formulated its construction, the archive here resides as a by-product of both power and cultural domination.