Francisco-Fernando Granados
residency location | toronto, ca
AIR August 25-31,2020
AIR August 25-31,2020
My multidisciplinary critical practice extends from performance and drawing into a range of media that includes installation, video, text, public and participatory projects. I draw from experiences of migration and queerness by using conceptual approaches and abstraction as strategies to structure the work. These strategies seek to challenge perceptions regarding the stability of identity categories like nationality, race, gender, and sexuality. One of the recurring themes in my work is the search for moments of agency within narratives of social and political struggle. I seek to make work that can give a sense to these moments through articulations of desire rather than through expressions of need.
The process for a work often begins with an observation based on a contemporary socio-political situation, theoretical question, or formal structure. From this observation, I excerpt an image, a phrase, a behavioural or compositional pattern, and make an intervention in order to reframe it. This intervention aims to open up possibilities for imagining and behaving, both for me as an artist and for an incalculable public. I want the work to reach people as sentient beings and thinking agents.
I was born in the midst of the Guatemalan Civil War. The experience of coming to Canada as a refugee with my family informs the politics and aesthetics of my practice. In my work, bodies cross borders and become agents for the materialization of conceptual structures. Actions yield a material trace that also performs as an artwork. This way of working develops from the intersection of my formal training in traditional forms, academic training in cultural theory, history of working with newcomer communities as a peer worker, and the development of my practice through artist-run culture in Toronto and previously Vancouver.
︎Francisco-Fernando’s IG