Marcel Pardo Ariza

Absolute joy was palpable as I watched Marcel Pardo Ariza take portraits of the back of folks’ heads for a theatrical composition. Wrangling strangers for a photo and earning trust in a split second is challenging, so the relative anonymity proved to be a magical incentive. Even more compelling was how Marcel radiated empathy as people smiled and posed, backs to the camera, most a bit stunned at the unexpected surreality of momentary reverence. Marcela is a charming cynosure with a knack for encouraging others to kindle their own special souls. Pushing against the history of representation and gaze, it is a boundless practice that incinerates expectations with a warm, sweet fire. 

 

Marcel Pardo Ariza: Leather shorts, a persimmon and a tiny portable speaker.

 

I moved to San Francisco from Brooklyn in 2014 to do my MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. I was drawn to the Queer legacy of San Francisco and the photographic history of SFAI. Six years have passed now, and I have met longtime friends, mentors and collaborators and worked with multiple artist-run spaces, bookstores, galleries, museums and organizations. I now consider San Francisco part of my artistic home. 

This is Weird Without You is a series of posters in English and Spanish, made in dialogue with Latinx, women and Queer-owned local businesses in the Mission District of San Francsico that were printed at home and wheat-pasted on boarded-up storefronts at the beginning of shelter-in-place. The project, made in collaboration with the sweet Juan Carlos Rodriguez Rivera and Felipe Garcia Jr., intended to have a poetic energy in public space that recognizes the fact that we are all interconnected and need each other’s support now more than ever. We wanted to celebrate local places that we regularly used to visit as a way to honor their labor and struggle to keep small businesses afloat during this poorly managed health and economic crisis. 

 

The project grew exponentially. We did an iteration at KADIST, an online exhibition and a limited edition of the posters with Ochi Projects in Los Angeles, and we did an iteration at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s entrance, as the museum is being called to do urgent and ongoing anti-racist work. The messages of the posters read: “We need a museum that destroys white supremacy / We want Black, Indigenous and People of Color in leadership positions / We want Trans*, Queers and non-binary folks leading the way / We need an anti-racist, transfeminist and intersectional museum.” This is just the very beginning of the necessary changes that art and cultural institutions must undertake to become actually inclusive.

 

We are also working with the Museo Tamayo to do an iteration of the project in Mexico City, a version much closer to the roots of the project, all in spanish. This all has happened within the last five months.

I am really drawn to poetry and how a few words can really take you, melt you and turn you upside down. Yesika Salgado’s poems do that to me every time. In 2018, I did a biweekly project #PoemsFromaWindow where I placed a poem or excerpt from womxn, POC, and Queer authors in large letters facing the street outside my studio. It can be particularly powerful to encounter large text in public space that invites you to have an effective response. The play of scale, both with text or images, can take on a whole different meaning; we need to bring more of that into the public realm. I want to collaborate with poets and make their words visible in large architectural spaces. We could all use more poetry in our lives. 

 

Public space brings so many folks unexpectedly together, despite their different positionalities. There is so much potential in that. As many museums and art institutions struggle to restructure and think about their own relevance and audience, there is an undeniable power in public space that shouldn’t be taken for granted. This is the perfect moment to reconsider how we want to relate to the streets and places we live, and how we can think about visibility, representation and shaping the visual world we want to see. Especially as outdated monuments are being taken down, what do we really want to see instead?

 

As for the art world and beyond, I want it to be truly inclusive; I want Black, Indigeneous, POC, disabled, trans, non-binary and undocumented folks in leadership positions. Imagine what that world would look like! I want visible and invisible labor to be fairly and generously compensated, and I want institutions to move beyond transactional one-time collaborations into ongoing non-hierarchical, long-term support. There is a lot of work to be done and we need to thoughtfully and intentionally dive right into it. 

 

 

They are people whom I deeply admire and care for. They are friends, collaborators, artists, thinkers, lovely people who have changed my life. In my new body of work, a lot of models are life-size cutouts from older Queer archives from past Pride parades, which are now part of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society. When I was going through some of the collections, I noticed a lot of the folks depicted in the photos were anonymous, and by inviting them into a current project, I wanted to honor them and their contributions to Queer history.

 

I’ve been working with Reference Archivist Isaac Fellman to use photographs from older Pride parades in the Crawford Wayne Barton Papers, Elaine Gay Jarvis Papers, Marie Euda Papers, all from the GLBT Historical Society. I’ve made cutouts from those photographs and worked with incredible folks like Nicole Santamaria from the El/La para TransLatinas, JanpiStar from AXIS Dance company, Jocquese Whitfield and Sissy Slays, Spanglish reina Juli Delgado Lopera, artists and cultural workers Kat Trataris, Leila Weefur, Grace Towers, Vertel Jackson Beatrice Thomas, Kevin Seaman, Juan Carlos Rodriguez Rivera, activist Alex Locust and Matti Bautista, Andrew Lopez, bartenders Jessi Lorraine, Christian Suzuki-Orellana, Mireya Aguilar, Felipe Garcia Jr., Jordanne Ho-Shue, cultural workers dragas Betty Towers, Rihanna Wintour (Ismael) and other folks I haven’t photographed yet. In advance, I thank them for being a part of the project.  

 

It is important for me to call it photography because the history of photography is complex and very rooted in colonialism, and I want the work to use and question that framework. However, I want to expand what we consider photography into something more malleable and less rigid, and to me, that manifests in making the work more site-specific, using various materials and scales, and disregarding old photography paradigms. Honestly, what fascinates me the most about photography is how three-dimensional spaces get flattened, and how it provides space for illusion and graphic composition, and turning a space into something new.

 

Composition and certain elements of the photo shoot are considered in advance, and I am always open to the work evolving with the energy of the folks involved. I love the comradery that can happen and it makes the process of the work another way of spending social time together. The close-ups are a way of photographing and reframing our expectations of the photograph differently by focusing on details, gestures and moments that would be less visible, otherwise, in a more straightforward shot.

 

So much! I’ve learned to make my own frames and change their traditional shapes, done large photographic installations, both indoors and outdoors, and collaborated with all sorts of people. I had the chance to run an interdisciplinary fellowship program at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts with Amy Vázquez and Marc Bamuthi Joseph where I also got to meet so many folks doing incredible work in various fields. We had so many wonderful, rich conversations that informed so much of the work that I do and the way I collaborate with people. My conceptual framework has expanded, and I’ve moved into making richer work in terms of materiality and also in terms of focusing more carefully in Queerness and kinship, and intergenerational connections and representation. 

 

I love hands and recognizing people by their “signature” hand gestures. Elbows are a bit silly but I gravitate to them, eyelashes are so sweet and special, and butts... butts are magic!

 

I’m always intrigued about why people are more or less likely to engage with photography. I’m interested in how we can shift our expectations of photography towards a way where we can still be included, even if we don’t want to be visible in a traditional way.

 

We wanted people to be able to recognize themselves and their peers while also remaining anonymous. It feels like a secret, if you know someone by the back of their heads, you can recognize them; but if you don’t, you don’t. It was also a way to question face recognition technology.

 

I love to play, making things and props cuter whenever possible. If you believe in theater, you can hold the sun and make it out of different materials. You can make your favorite bouquet out of faux flowers or you can bring back someone from the past with a life-size cutout of an old photograph. There is a possibility of building new narratives, and I find that particularly striking.  My parents both did theater when I was growing up, and their playfulness in moments of pain is just admirable. It’s a tool of survival and envisioning. I carry that playfulness with me and I hold it very dearly. In my work, I use the set both of my studio and the exhibition space as a site of possibility. It is in those spaces that things and roles can change, and we can reimagine the narratives we want to live in and the visual culture we want to see.

 

I’m currently working on a public art project that is part of Art on Market Street, organized by the San Francisco Arts Commission, and it will be displayed in bus shelters along Market Street starting in October. The project consists of photographing Queers from the past, borrowed from various photographs from the Gay, Lesbian Transgender Historical Society archive, with Queers from the present. The idea is to highlight transhistorical kinship, tenderness, resiliency and the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. This project is called Kin Streets and it honors the Queer folks who walked the streets we now walk in, and to celebrate the work we are all doing to keep this city at its Queerest, especially in this crucial moment in time.

 

I love this question. We should all spend some time thinking about our dream living situation; maybe it’ll help us materialize it.

 

Externally, the aesthetic would be similar to Freddy Mamani’s Neo-Andean architecture (if you don’t know what it is, you are in for a visual treat!) with gardens on the ceiling similar to those of Hundertwasser’s buildings. The living structure would be modular and mobile. Inside, there will be so many plants, fresh fruits, savory bites and tasty libations available, the lighting would be just right for each space, there will be soft areas of different heights to lay down, rest, read and play by yourself or with others. Friends and kin can come and go. All the art would be made by dear friends. Dinner parties are highly encouraged and so are pool reggaeton parties. An outdoor shower with two heads sounds really nice. Give me a couple of years, I’ll build this dream somewhere warm in Latin America with a couple of close friends. And of course, you will be invited!