Text-Based Artmaking Workshop
Saturday, September 28 , 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm CDT
Join University Galleries education staff for an artmaking workshop inspired by Rafael Soldi’s exhibition A moon, a peephole, an explosion, or a flashing memory. Participants will create text-based artworks inspired by Soldi’s Shards. Registration is required.
A moon, a peephole, an explosion, or a flashing memory features photographs, a handwritten text installation, and an EKG made from 2009 through 2023. Informed by the artist’s queer, Peruvian identity, the selected works reflect on the possibilities of language, memory, and imagining. In Soldi’s words, he “probes states of in-betweenness—especially as it occurs across tongues—providing nuanced insight into immigrant identity while also offering a rich metaphor for queer experience.”
The exhibition title is excerpted from one of Soldi’s own texts, which appeared on the cover of his Imagined Futures book. In the text, the artist addresses The Sun Will Set in the Same Place, a photograph featured in this exhibition. Soldi grew up in Peru and moved to the United States as a teenager, first to the east coast and then to the west coast. When he saw the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean in Seattle, 15 years after regularly seeing the same sight as a child in Peru, he was struck by a wave of nostalgia and a desire to reconcile his feelings about his home country. He then made the black-and-white photograph of what appears to be a brilliant, radiating orb. He writes, “I liked the ambiguity of this image too… it’s like being blinded by the sun, or it could be an eclipse or a black hole or a camera shutter or a moon or an explosion or a flashing memory or a peephole.” Special Collections at Milner Library recently acquired Soldi’s Imagined Futures book, and it will be on view in the exhibition.
Imagined Futures comprises 36 tiny, black-and-white self-portraits made in photo booths. Rather than making silly faces with friends or posing for an identification photo, Soldi was repeatedly photographed alone and with his eyes closed. In his words, the project marks his “persistent attempt at acknowledging the grief surrounding the futures abandoned after immigrating from his homeland and the social violence enacted on queer bodies.” Soldi extended the project to other queer, male-identifying, Latinx immigrants for Entre Hermanos. He collaborated with social worker Joel Aguirre to facilitate a conversation about how the participants “perceived their future as young people in their countries of origin,” how that perception may have changed, and how they could “reimagine their futures and pasts today.” Following the discussion, each participant could make their own self-portrait in a photo booth while being guided through a meditation exercise. The resulting photographs are presented in color and at a significantly larger scale than Soldi’s self-portraits.
For mouth to mouth, Soldi explores fluidity between two languages, Spanish and English, one that was slipping away and one that he was learning. The installation features dozens of handwritten words presented in individual frames: poema, problema, home, body, historia, histeria, memoria. Soldi said that the errors and mistranslations “yielded a directory of invented terms, a collection of tiny unintended poems.” Meanwhile Shards—which brings together poetry, astronomy, history, and language—is titled after one of Jay Hopler’s poems. Soldi etched four glass panels with a single word each: mother, boy, soft, and tongue. The words can form a variety of combinations and evoke a range of feelings depending on the background of the viewer. Behind each word is a black-and-white photograph depicting the stars over his mother on the night Soldi was born. The artist visited the observatory in Lima, Peru, to create the images. Marcapasos, an EKG displayed as an artist’s book, demonstrates another form of language. The EKG recorded the electrical activities in Soldi’s heart when he was eleven years old. The artist writes, “I was moved by finding this ‘written record of my own heart as a child, at a time when I was aware of my queerness and my difference but had no language for it.”
