Luis Interview - R&R

For the past years, I have combined my artistic practice with volunteering at an NGO. I was part of the beginning of this organization and its opening of a migrant shelter in Chihuahua, my hometown in the border of México-USA.

For many years, I documented in a traditional sense the Central-American and US deportees persons in the Chihuahua shelter and other places of transit, such as train tracks, government detention facilities, and other shelters around Mexico. But, as hate speech began to intensify in the country through xenophobic, aporophobic and plainly violent representations of migration in the media, I decided to explore a different approach for documenting the situation. This exploration led me to experiment with doing collaborative projects.

Right now, my project centers around creating dialogues with children that are undergoing a process of migration. I am at reflecting their voice, in different mediums and languages, on the agency on their lives and how adultocentrism strives to deprive them from it.

To achieve this, I have been working with a create-by-listening approach. The children that I worked with in Chihuahua came up with the idea of doing a movie and, specifically, a horror movie. I believe this genre of film will guide the project into defying the preconceived notions around children.

I am searching to continue with this idea with children undergoing a migration process in Europe. I want to recreate the project to create a narrative that binds together two different groups of people in different regions of the world.