“Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.” ― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
For the past twenty years, I have investigated the effect and impact of homesickness through the creation of non-traditional physical spaces, their meaning and the new ways that they can be reinterpreted. As an interdisciplinary artist focusing on performance art, installation and photography these spaces containing displaced (objects, body, and garments) have been used not only to reimagine personal and external narratives but as a process of unfolding the strains of systemic invisibility and exclusion.
My approach to art-making comes from a process of inquiry, research, and intergenerational collaboration. Subjects and references drafted from domesticity, labor, and self-determination are often used not only to question but to disrupt narratives that perpetuate and idealize the invisibility of black and brown bodies, institutionally, particularly through the commodification of such.
Brenda Torres-Figueroa, is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and art educator born and raised in Puerto Rico working mainly between performance art, installations and public art. In the year 2000, she graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras and soon after moved to Chicago to pursue her Masters in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Brenda is also an alum of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (‘02) and had participated and developed multiple collective exhibitions and performances both in Chicago and Puerto Rico. Her return to Puerto Rico in 2004, enabled her to develop an art teaching methodology based on contemporary practices and curatorial experience at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Santurce until her permanent return to Chicago in 2008. Since then Brenda has been devoted to her art education practice, raising her two daughters and branding her designs through Freedom Effect.
In 2018, as her homeland recovered from the devastation caused by Hurricane María, she began the process of restaging and curating almost two decades of unedited work that questioned the complex variables of invisibility, homesickness, grief, and resistance embedded within the idea of home. Her exhibition/event series titled Dressed as Home and Refuge investigates the transnational and intergenerational effects of homesickness and nostalgia. Through an interdisciplinary use of visual storytelling, architectural garments, and video this project aims to visualize the complex variables of grief and also resistance embedded within the idea of home and collective displacement.
Reminiscence 1996-2000
I was able to find photography as a resourceful medium that allowed me to further explore and document new ideas connected to my perception of home as a non physical space. Each image contained psychological and emotional spaces that I was never able to reconstruct as mindscapes or even as literal immersive spaces, there were just pieces of a past, present and distant future. Through photography, the physical space was mainly portrayed intimate, domestic, but also transgressed. It was about understanding what I once knew as home, and now was unavailable, unsafe, shattered but also filled with calmness.
Coerción Series 1998
Originally titled La femme qui n’existe pas, was conceived in 1998 and reframed and retitled in 2018 as part of a process of curating and restaging over two decades of unedited work. This piece beyond capturing an exhausted and obscured figure, cleaning up the mess after a self-destructive breakdown, resurfaces as evidence, as checkout point, as the presently vanished. Coerción for me is also a point of departure that aims to question and confront the perpetual state of transgression against black girls and women around the world, and it is not an end.