Q&A with Dalila Sanabria, 2024-25 Artist-in-Residence
The Latinx Project announces the selection of Dalila Sanabria as the 2024-25 Artist-in-Residence.
Dalila Sanabria is an MFA graduate in Sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her materially charged practice explores themes of displacement, permanence, and belonging. Before the start of her residence, Sanabria spoke with the curator of the exhibition, Laura G. Gutiérrez, about her sculpture practice, approach, and inspirations. We invite you to save the date for her exhibition entitled “This Will Pass" opening on September 14, 2024 at 20 Cooper Square at New York University.
Gutiérrez: Your large-scale installations often blend material that can seem incompatible, incongruous, or even illogical. There’s a recurring turn to organic materials such as the mixture of dirt, straw, and clay (termed bahareque) that you use to build your sculptural video installations, mixing the organic with technologies. You are also drawn to flour and have used it in odd ways, such as making a functional oven out of this material and lighting it. Can you speak to the use of organic materials in these ways in your work?
Sanabria: In retrospect, a lot of my early work’s material parameters came from a real fear and aversion towards permanent and traditional mediums. Although these were perhaps a bit prejudiced on my part, reflecting real-life trauma reckonings and scarcity-born circumstances, I am also grateful for what they did to my work. I developed a real sensitivity and commitment to precarious, disposable things, like peeling cardboard and crumbling plaster, and discovered their narrative-telling powers as a result.
Bread and salt dough came from a desire to mold, shape, and use sustenance to create form. I was fascinated by its ubiquitous warmth as well as its susceptibility to temperature, moisture and time. Using bahareque has been a reclamation of a sustainable construction method that was both visually congruent and historically relevant. My father’s grandparents lived in houses made of bahareque in Tolima, Colombia. Many of these walls are exposed and raw, with their dirt, straw and bamboo stick striated surfaces visible. A cousin to adobe brick-laying, bahareque is also its unique method, specific to the region of my heritage. In this respect, every material feels important in my selection.
The recent introduction of video technologies and kinetics has been new––an attempt to converge what had formerly been separate (video and photographic documentarian work) with the material happenings in my studio, and the result has been difficult and exciting for me. It’s complicated, because how far do you go before humility is lost and process is forgotten? At the same time, these blends feel theatrical, like theme parks or stages, and far more imaginative.
G: Your aesthetic process is grounded in your geographical multi-sitedness, which doesn’t mean that you are able to be in multiple spaces at once, but of your own being as a dual national of Chile and Colombia, and having grown up in Central Florida, can you speak to the importance of these geographies in your art?
S: My homes have been sites of both love and isolation, and my recollections of these places are full of contrasting experiences. The multi-sightedness you mention I think is inevitable as I genuinely can’t forget my background. My mother’s Chilenez, por ejemplo, has always been relayed to me as distinctively different than my father’s Colombianidad. My mother and her quick, sharp wit, her taste for pan in the morning and in the evening para la once, and the way she’ll only eat porotos as a soup or salad, never as the daily accompaniment that my dad knows as frijoles con arroz. I mean, these may be superficial distinctions, but defending the specifics of my background has been something I’ve done since a very young age. I mostly grew up in a rural, white-majority area. Central Florida’s demographics have grown exponentially since 1996, with more and more Latin Americans making their way north in a gentrified expulsion from Miami. My parents had found each other through the LDS/Mormon church in south Florida, both converted via missionaries and later moved to Lakeland to build their home and family.
Then, when I was twelve years old, my parents were deported. I was the one who answered the door to the ICE officers. We were forced to sell our house. We moved to Bogotá, spent a year close to Valparaíso in Chile, and then moved back to Colombia during many of the formative years of my adolescence. I didn’t know Spanish at the time and was homeschooled. I moved back to Florida at sixteen, as my parents waited out their penalty of ten years before being able to reenter the United States.
Those were difficult years. In a very literal way, I’m a reverse kind of immigrant and emigrant, a diasporee, an exile, a dreamer and beneficiary, and a transnational vagrant. I see these geographies as simultaneous points of emergence and departure and hearths that my work orbits around. They were introduced to me as alien lands, prisons I initially resented, and foreign planets on which we were outcasts. But they became my inheritance, and eventually, my loves and comforts. I learned that fantasy is bred in isolation.
G: Is it appropriate to say that your art is in part an exploration of trying to (and maybe not being able to fully) reconcile with the myriad dimensions of your Identity?
S: There are many lenses to choose from to look through my work: diasporic, formal, material-based, spiritual, religious, architectural, documentarian, brown, queer, theatrical, etc. I’m painfully aware of the power I hold in the way I choose to speak about my work and the identitarian lenses I use. I perceive "not being able to fully" as a consequence of impositional authority. These authorities, whether patriarchal, religious, historical, institutional, hierarchical, or bureaucratic, are systemized structures that can organize and withstand at their best but antagonize and prohibit at their worst. My relationship with these systems has been situational, and their complications arise from existing in contradiction.
My work will always reconcile with what is pressing and real to me, with what is urgent. It always seems to fall back on this act of reconciliation—what it means to conjoin or depart, and what it means to pair two things that resist, like oil and water. Whatever those standards of purity or exaltation are, I can’t help this inescapable reverent affect my work falls back on. I can't help but make work that operates within intimacies and oppositions. I believe most artists feel similarly.
G: Is it possible to get a sneak peek into your upcoming AIR show with Latinx Project, can we expect organic materials and the multiplicity of your being?
S: I’m thinking about dance parties, ancestral cosmologies, queer imaginative futures, migratory vessels, Judeo-Christian scripture, poetry, and geography. I’m also looking at Chilean and Colombian indigenous mythologies and my connection to and separation from them. So much of my work has been made during difficult feelings, as I’ve revisited painful reminders of separation and loss. This work for TLP feels like a breath of relief. It’s an attempt for something more celebrative, acknowledging displacement as an opportunity rather than a consequence, whose residue leaves new buds for growth and possibility.
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About the AIR
Dalila Sanabria is a Chilean-Colombian-American artist from central Florida. Working primarily with sculpture and video, her work references domestic sites and sacred architectures, accumulating organic materials as catalysts for exploring displacement, permanence, and belonging. Sanabria has received an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art, a BFA in Art, and a BA in Portuguese Studies from Brigham Young University. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, UT; Ortega y Gassett Projects in Brooklyn, New York City; Roman Susan Gallery in Chicago, IL, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery in Philadelphia, PA; and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Her work has been written about and mentioned in Art in America, Terremoto Magazine, SaltLakeUnderground Magazine, and Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. She is also the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, being a Gilbert Fellow at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and participated in residencies and workshops at the Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Sweet Pass Sculpture School, and ACRE (Artists’ Cooperate Residency & Exhibitions).
About the Curator
Laura G. Gutiérrez is Associate Professor in Latinx Studies in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and Associate Dean for Community Engagement and Public Practice in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Gutiérrez is the author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (recipient of an MLA book award) and has published on Latinx performance, border art, Mexican video art, and Mexican political cabaret. She was a Scholars Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles during the Fall of 2022 and a UT Provost Author’s Fellow from 2022-23, and thanks to these she was able to work on her manuscript entitled Binding Intimacies in Contemporary Queer Latinx Performance and Visual Art. In Austin, TX she also serves as the Artistic Director for OUTsider, a nonprofit queer and trans arts organization that programs an annual festival in the community.
About the Latinx Project at NYU
The Latinx Project at New York University explores and promotes U.S. Latinx Art, Culture and Scholarship through creative and interdisciplinary programs. Founded in 2018, it serves as a platform to foster critical public programming and for hosting artists and scholars. The Latinx Project is especially committed to examining and highlighting the multitude of Latinx identities as central to developing a more inclusive and equitable vision of Latinx Studies.
Supporters
The 2024-25 Artist-in-Residence program is made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation.