GALLERY | $5-10 SUGGESTED DONATION | ALL AGES | Join us for the opening of solo show, Querencia: Recuerdos TransFormterizas, by Gabriel Guzmán.
Growing up between San Diego and Tijuana, Gabriel developed an attachment to their family's photo-albums and yearned to build a lifetime of memories that they could always return to no matter where they were. This feeling in your heart we go to when we look for home across everyday experiences can be described as querencia. Querencia: Recuerdos TransFormterizas is a photo-series about home that aims to gather and share the affective experiences of communities of color living between San Diego and Tijuana. Querencia is dedicated to building an archive of these moments across the everyday lives of these communities in the form of photographs and mixed-media informed by Latinx cultural traditions.
This exhibition draws on the Chicano concept of “lo rasquache” to unveil how these communities turn to querencia as a relational strategy of survival rooted in community and friendship. Querencia as a “domesticana” sensibility builds on the Chicano concept of “lo rasquache” to reconsider the spatiality of home by disrupting the borders between the personal and the political, geography and place, the photographer and subjects by centering queerness in the context of the U.S-Mexico borderlands. And more importantly, querencia unveils the transformative possibilities that emerge from these histories rooted in the quotidian and the intimate.
Across these portraits taken from 2021-2024 are celebratory moments and gatherings of everyday life and joy that showcase what queer and trans of color presence and friendship builds upon— where querencia ruminates across the places, spaces, and people we call home, and our futurity is layered across nuestros (our) recuerdos (memories). Gabriel’s work with film photography emerges as a practice of feeling for home across these stories that amplify moments of collectivity and belonging. Here, photography produces a visual archive of minoritarian storytelling rooted in community-building and self-fashioning that remains largely absent from hegemonic narratives about the U.S-Mexico borderlands. When we listen and dream alongside these photos, may we bear witness to the layered sensaciónes of queer and trans of color life and everyday performances of friendship, de nuestras querencias.
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This event will be indoors.