Former Ox-Bow Artist-in-Residence, Emilio Rojas (2017), responds to the last 15 years of his work. Even while looking back, he never stops the pursuits of forward and next. While on tour with his exhibition tracing a wound through my body, he has executed new performances at various museums and galleries. At his last stop at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts, he takes the time to reflect on the process.
The exhibition tracing a wound through my body was first conceptualized in 2020. As Rojas began to look back on his work he realized it stretched back 15 years. Multidisciplinary in scope, the work investigates colonialism through film, print, and photographic capturings of various performance pieces.
“I’m making work that is not always easy to digest,” Rojas says, nor does it appear easy to execute. His performance pieces often require undergoing intense physical duress. “I’m interested in these sorts of intense experiences, or catharsis, rather,” Rojas elaborated. This is obvious in the capturing of a performance piece in which the artists’ arms are wrapped around a cactus. He spent hours hugging it in heat of over 100º F, conditions so extreme that it solicited hallucinations. In another video, Rojas sits under a tree for six hours, drinking a slow drip of sap from the tapped tree. The performance ends when he has consumed liquid equal to the amount of water in the human body.
Visitors of the exhibit inevitably might wonder about the why behind it all, and those that search for an answer discover Rojas’s work never lacks intent or poetics. “Performance, for me, it’s a way to process,” says Rojas. In “Instructions for Becoming (Waterfall)” the artist participated in what he described as a sort of rebirth. The photo was taken the day after Rojas moved to a new city and took a new job after a divorce. “It looks like I’m drowning,” he says of the photo, “but it actually felt like a purification.” This is not the only piece for which Rojas’s initial audience was mother-nature. In his similarly titled portrait photo “Instructions for Becoming,” Rojas disappears into the root system of a tree. He sought it out during a trip back to Mexico amidst frustrations and anxiety while awaiting his green card. “I tried to find a tree with the thickest roots to connect back to my roots,” he explained.
While reflecting on more political work, he shared the advice he once received from his mentor Tania Bruguera “Political art, it’s site specific, but it’s also time specific… you have to do it when it’s urgent.” Though he initially attached this lens to political art, the same can be said for the work that leans more heavily on what Rojas describes as “poetics.”
Far from completely abandoning the political nature of his work, Rojas has instead attempted to strike a balance between poetics and politics. Since 2021, he has created site specific performance pieces that engage with the history of the exhibition spaces. In the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts, he conducted a choreographed performance piece that centered around cleaning the Center’s Hanes House, whilst wearing Hanes clothing. His work is highly influenced by poets such as Gloria E. Anzaldua, Ocean Vuong, Nikki Giovanni, Clauda Rankine, Audre Lorde, and Pamela Sneed. Rojas views performance as “poetic movement… with your body you’re creating poetry.”
In his ongoing performance piece “A Manual to Be (to Kill) or To Forgive My Own Father,” Rojas literally dissects his father’s book Pequeño Hombre and reorients the words on self healing cutting matts. As if the materials themselves aren’t poetic enough, the poems he creates through the words elevate it all the more, as does the communal foundation of the process. Rojas refers to the process as “mining” for poems and invites others that have complex relationships with their fathers to participate in the process with him. During one-on-one sessions with Rojas, participants are encouraged to engage in conversation with him and construct a poem of their own on one of the self-healing matts.
Rojas started this exercise eight years ago in 2015. “My healing of that relationship has taken that long,” he expressed. Even as he continues to mine into this multi-year investigation, he keeps looking forward. The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art marks the last stop of the three-year exhibition tour of tracing a wound through my body. Next, Rojas heads to Georgia to participate in a residency where he looks forward to digging through footage of the various performance installations he’s created over the past two years.
More information on Emilio Rojas and his work is available at emiliorojas.studio.