Temporary Solutions That Stay Forever

The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center Inc. (The Clemente) is a Puerto Rican/Latino cultural institution that has demonstrated a broad-minded cultural vision and a collaborative philosophy. While The Clemente’s mission is focused on the cultivation, presentation, and preservation of Puerto Rican and Latino culture, it is equally determined to operate in a multi-cultural and inclusive manner, housing and promoting artists and performance events that fully reflect the cultural diversity of the Lower East Side and the city as a whole.

The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural &Education Center

Dates: September 15th - October 22nd , 2022
Gallery: LES Gallery at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center

107 Suffolk St

Precarity is one of the words that characterizes Latin America; thin threads sustaining a whole political, social, cultural body, which is about to break, yet it never does. In a reverse reaction, it survives under its own rules and subtle dynamics usually based on creativity and endurance. Living under these conditions creates specific ways of navigating the waters of economic survival. Here, being an artist is a privilege: sometimes painful, sometimes heroic. 

Spontaneity, vulnerability, fragility, uncertainty, together with the unsolved, and the temporary solutions that finally stay forever, are situations to face under the precarious system. Today these conditions are visibly a global reality rather than a characteristic of the global South. Climate change, a lingering pandemic, and a worldwide never-ending migration crisis are events that we all share and prove once more that the sense of control and certainty that we seek is a fantasy. 

However, Temporary solutions that stay forever aims to show how these conditions can be a possibility, a potential, a creative force, that gives space to unique and unexpected ways to live, create, and maybe continue being an artist. 

The exhibition ensembles the work of three artists from Latin American descent, living in the NYC area. Through different approaches and media -such as sculpture, video, and performance- they embrace the notions of precarity, vulnerability, and uncertainty. 

Christhian Diaz makes work that addresses the delicate and fundamental relations he has built in the US as an undocumented immigrant for 15 years. He has been making performance, sculpture, and photography, portraying the space that his relationships hold, as well as the feelings that they engender. 

Joshua Araujo’s sculptures come from a place of vague familiarity, like saying a word over and over again until you have blurred its meaning; or the vestige of a daydream when the mind wanders away. His work also suggests a sense of playful domestic misunderstanding, like mixing words and meanings when speaking in a foreign language. The provisional integration of surreal, nearly abstract ceramic shapes that point towards a subject, and a dedication to material experimentation reveals an absurd and sometimes humorous space between reality and fiction. 

Catalina Tuca works with found objects and their multiple mediated representations to explore the intersections of geographic identities, collective memories, and hybrid systems of collaboration, and participation through existing technologies. The Sensitive Project -her most recent work born during the 2020 pandemic- is a participative audiovisual exercise that shapes emotions, helping people visualize, and even touch their own feelings. Through online conversations, participants from all over the world are invited to describe their emotions. Their answers are then rendered by designers, giving these feelings a form. Constantly growing and evolving, the project exposes a global intimacy through the interpretation and translation of the invisible into digital corporeality. 

The exhibition will be presented at the LES Gallery, in an installation that includes sculptures from Josh Araujo, a selection of sculptures and videos from Catalina Tuca’s The Sensitive Project, and a series of performances by Christhian C Diaz.

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Temporary Solutions That Stay Forever

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Temporary Solutions That Stay Forever

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