ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Francis Almendárez is an artist, filmmaker, and educator from South Central, Los Angeles. His work takes many different forms including collaborations, performances, screenings, workshops, and exhibitions that have been presented in museum, university, arts nonprofit, artist-run, virtual, and DIY spaces both nationally and internationally. Through the merging of history, autoethnography, and cultural production, his works offer ways to navigate and reconcile with intergenerational trauma, and reclaim diasporic identities. Recent presentations include screenings at Miami New Media Festival and LOOKING FORWARD, London; DIY photography and filmmaking workshops in Honduras and El Salvador; public photo-murals at FotoFest, Houston; and a collaborative performance at Antenna, New Orleans. Almendárez is an Assistant Professor of Photography/Video and Studio Art at California State University San Bernardino, and previously lectured at University of Houston School of Art and Houston Community College. He received his MFA (with Distinction) from Goldsmiths, University of London, and BFA in Sculpture/New Genres from Otis College of Art and Design.

Alejandra R. Bolaños. Puerto de Veracruz (1991)
The artist and archivist resides and operates in Xalapa, Veracruz, México. She is currently engaged in crafting narratives centered around pirates in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as themes of oil and chaneques. Her artistic endeavors are predominantly rooted in the concept of humidity within archives, expressed through various mediums such as drawings, texts, broadcasting, collaborative efforts, and community projects. Her exploration extends to the representation of the tropical landscape in southern Mexico and its correlation with the recent surge in violence. She has contributed to numerous collections of contemporary art as a researcher and cataloger.

She is an active member of the Bruma Laboratoria collective, a cohort of artists situated in Xalapa, Veracruz, with a focus on pedagogies and contemporary art. Within this collective, she delves into themes encompassing territory, gender, and anti-racism.

Recently she has been invited to Archives of the Common V within the Red de Conceptualismos del Sur and the Reina Sofía Museum (2023), Camp - Arts Educators in Residence for documenta Fifteen (2022), selected for the secueLA program, a school of care by Lugar a Dudas, TEOR/éTica, and Capacete (2022), the Sixth Annual Symposium of Latin American Art "Movement and Presence: Visual Culture in the Americas" (2022), SOMA Summer residency (2021), Matamoros 404 Oaxaca residency (2021), and the public program of the FEMSA Biennial (2020).

ABOUT THE SERIES

The New Commons is a series of online screenings, virtual live collaborations and discussions around the imaginaries of the homeland as they are shaped by digital communication technologies, such as instant messaging apps, video calls, social media and the constant exchanges of videos and images whether personal or throughout the internet. In pairing works from diasporic artists and those from their homeland, the series seeks to portray the active and collective imagination around the construction of place and sense of belonging while revealing deeply embedded social and political disparities across the world. Historically, the term 'commons' is used to refer to natural resources, belonging equally to a community, a nation, a culture.

The 'new commons' designates the common digital space of the internet that has become the new foundation of our global transnational and transgenerational culture. This series is created and presented by our 2023/2024 Curatorial Fellow, Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai.