ANDRÉS PÉREZ
DEAD FAMILY
HSS HIGH STREET STUDIOS 10AM - 6PM
I grew up in a family surrounded by women and lonely maternities. I grew up watching the absence of fatherhood. Men were less than women, but they decided and invoked blind strength. At 12, I began to recognize my diversity. At 18, I experienced my first bereavement: my cousin Jose committed suicide.
My relatives said that Joseito was homosexual and that is why he decided to take his own life. Corrective violence and binary violence often do not allow the diverse to inhabit the world. In 2013 my mother died and this marked a separation from my family. I moved away from that home that was both a refuge and a concentration camp. In 2022 I began to revisit the family archive, and I understood that I was not in it.
Dead Family is research that looks at the family archive as a binary historical document that protects heteronormative narratives imposed by patriarchal structures. These impositions imply a sexist order that separates the masculine from the feminine and marginalizes identities that are outside of this
political-biological mechanism. Diverse identities have no visibility in the action of the "family portrait".
Dead Family is a work that intervenes in the family archive. It is a photographic intervention, but also a political one. It is a naturally collective project that needs the voice and the eyes of our community.
This collaborative nature allows each collaborator who opens the pages of his or her album for us to look at it together, to also intervene in their own archives based on the premise: What would a more diverse memory look like for the future?
Andrés Pérez (Venezuela, b.1993) is a photographer and non-binary visual artist. His studied art and film at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, and built a sensitivity for the image in his work.
In 2019 they migrated to Bogota-Colombia and this trip coincided with the decision to start their photographic career. As a diverse and migrant person, their work focuses on gender identity narratives, memory, and binary violence. They address other issues related to the anti-patriarchal narrative and the deconstruction of the heteronormative with the interest of preserving a more diverse memory. As a storyteller, they not only has the need to narrate about others, but they are also interested in speaking from an intimate and autobiographical place.
Their visual language is a mix between portraiture, documentary narratives, fashion and expanded photography. During 2021 they were part of the Semillero Migrante program, a space in which they developed their first project Espectro. They are currently working on a second chapter of Dead Family, a photographic archive project with a focus on gender.
