Emilio Rojas

Emilio Rojas, Open Wound: A Gloria, 2023, Two-sided risograph print, 17 x 11 inches. Edition of 500. Photos by Julia Gillard.

Emilio Rojas, Open Wound: a Gloria, 2023, Risograph print handout, 11 x 17 inches. Edition of 500. Performance, 45 mins, repeated every year since 2014 taking place at the gallery on Saturday, December 9, 5-7 PM. 

Wall Text: Centering borders as sites of trauma, the ongoing work and multimedia piece Open Wounds: A Gloria commemorates the queer mestiza theorist Gloria Anzaldúa while making visible the difficulties met by thousands of South Americans who cross the U.S.-Mexico border each year. For Rojas’ performance, tattoo artist Sujetka dry tattoos the outline of the border on the artist’s back. The point of crossing becomes a wound and a blurred geographic line on Rojas’s body. To tackle the pain of the tattooing, Rojas clenches Anzaldúa’s seminal book Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza between his teeth—finding comfort in her words he makes visible the struggle and resilience of Latinx immigrants in the United States. Making the performance visible in the exhibition Rojas has created a risograph print featuring a letter from Anzaldúa’s archive, predating her book.

About

Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. As a queer, Latinx immigrant with Indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Besides his artistic practice, he is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant, and refugee youth. He holds an M.F.A. in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.F.A. in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada.