In this interview for Lenscratch, Karen Navarro speaks to Vicente Cayuela about her inspiration to create work addressing photo-sculpture, race, indigeneity, and her experiences as an immigrant in the United States.
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Somos Millones—on view at Foto Relevance from January 13 through February 25, 2023—delivers a critical reminder amid a climate of increasingly hostile xenophobic demagoguery: Portraiture as an act of defiance attests to the power that counter visuality plays in reshaping the immigrant experience into a legitimate identity in the global imagination. However, such feat is only possible if we defy every internalized constriction that occludes our capacity for self/representation in the larger cultural and political arena. Much like the hybridity in Navarro’s photo works, it is this “potential for diversity and variability of structures” that will allow millions to enact such pivotal agency. Only then can we envision a society where the wide spectrum of migrating identities can fully blossom in the shifting tectonics of a more pluralistic American national identity. As art historian and cultural critic T.J.Demos has noted, “far more radical is universalizing the migrant as the experience of being human, and determining a politics of equality on that basis.”
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