View source for Luis Text on practice

== Text on work ==
March, 2021
Luis Luján

Both my recent and my current work revolve around participative projects with children in a context of forced migration. My recent work was done in a shelter in my home city of Chihuahua, Mexico, and my current work is the preparation of a project in the upcoming months both with an organization in Calais, France and in another in a shelter in Queretaro, Mexico.

Additionally, I worked on a short film for the EYE Research Labs In the Eye Filmmuseum. “I AM FLOWING”, is a five-minute short film based on an artistic gesture, as it portrays the story of a toy house I found in a destroyed refugee camp in the Calais region in France, and what happened after I set out to repair it and bring it back.

==== Description of recent work ====

My most recent work is a short film documenting the creation of a horror film in collaboration with Angel, a migrant boy from Honduras. I am currently finalizing the editing process where I mix scenes from the screenwriting process and production of the film that took place weeks before starting the Lens-Based programme. 

the boy in the abandoned house is a film that shares my encounter with forcibly displaced children as we aim to create a participatory film. When I began this project, I asked the children in the shelter what kind of movie they wanted to make, and they chose to do a horror movie. During this time, Angel, a young boy from Honduras, arrived at the shelter. He became the protagonist of the project right away. He surprised people with his inventiveness, he could lighten up spaces with his spontaneous rap bits and he was very vocal about the violence he lived through in his journey. Horror films happened to be his favorite genre, and we shot many hours of conversations planning the film. This is how I compiled so many heartbreaking memories of his life, the kind that could make anyone cry. I had the perfect character for my story, and I felt horrible for having found him.

I told Angel that I was making a film sharing how we were making a horror movie together and that I would use the voice recordings to remember all the things I learned from him. He told me it was fine as long as he could not be identified. He left before we could finish. This short film shares how creation and experiences in this context are subject to the underlying forces of migration I cannot control.

[[File:The boy of the abandoned house WORK IN PROGRESS SCREENSHOTS.jpg|thumb]]

==== Description of current work ====

I am currently working on expanding this work further by facilitating medium and long term workshops with children who have migrated or are currently on the move both in Mexico and France. 

I am currently in the process of consolidating a collaboration with two different NGOs, in Mexico and in France, in order to implement this project. I plan to work a 4 month long program both remotely and on location this summer in Mexico. I have to deal with different uncertainties, firstly the freedom of work I  will get from institutions I have not worked with before, and most importantly, in having the migrant children and tutors motivated to participate.

The project aims to document the ideas, experiences and produces arising from the art classes for children I will facilitate at the shelters and the production of a participatory horror short-film. Children will be taught storytelling frameworks and filmmaking techniques, and I will fill the technical gaps where needed. The lines between their own films and my documentary will diffuse, as well as scenes of fiction and nonfiction. During art therapy classes the children will be encouraged to make handmade masks to conceal their identity during the film.

The pedagogical work that I carry out, document and share with this population has potential to generate impacts on the collective imagination on issues as complex as discrimination against people in the context of global mobility. I believe in the potentiality of children to become historical subjects, and collective protagonists of necessary social transformations, of migration as a decolonial process. They are creators of their own lives and projects, in times when modernity considers them disposable, and despises their desires, thoughts, acts, and historicity. 

==== Relationship between recent and current work ====

With both my recent and current work, comes the questions I want to keep exploring: how similar (or not) are horror films to migration stories? Who are the ghosts in these stories? Why did it feel right that migrant children decided to do a horror film and not a normal happy ending movie?

For this reason, this year I have been expanding my theoretical framework and critical reflection. I am currently researching topics about ethics, art therapy, decoloniality, participatory art, and filmmaking. 

Also, both of them are in collaboration with civil society. My current work is similar to my recent one as it is also collaborative in nature and it intends to involve children to have a central role in the decision making from the script writing to the editing of the film. It initially integrated perspectives of children in Mexico and in a second phase it will be further continued in Europe. As opposed to most related projects and media representations, migration is not directly discussed nor the personal stories of the children. The migration context can be felt in a subtle way throughout and how it affects the unexpected unfolding of the narrative.
		 	 	 		
==== Differences between recent and current work ====

On the other hand, I have found that I now want to focus on long term collaborations. For this, I want to both find participants that will commit for a process lasting several months in the case of Mexico, and in the case of France, I am thinking about moving there for some time to also create a stable co-creation dynamic.  I want to improvise less in the general framework, and on the other hand improvise more on the everyday particular. I also am planning on setting up dynamics that might open new explorations such as coediting the process, collaboration. I want to recreate the project to create a narrative that binds together two different groups of people in different regions of the world. 

==== Next steps ====

I wish to be part of projects where art is both part of a social change and a reflection of it.  I have been gaining an interest in the aesthetics of ethics. That is, as I think it implies two things.  I wish I could find a way in which the more pressing material needs could really be met by people that are forcibly displaced. I am starting through education, but I hope I can create projects that follow the line of “useful art.” 

I think there are multiple overlaps that legal action, participatory art, and educational projects can guide into potential benefits. Through this perspective I am aware of a potential failed long term project that presents a participatory spectacle that does not change anything in favor of people participating.

==== Necessary mentoring ====

Questioning my idea of working with migrant children has been an endless quest for me. There are too many worries, implications, risks of portraying their lives, and it takes me long discussions with myself and others in order to feel at peace with my decisions. However, there is one question that persists: how can I (ethically) help these children to represent the violence they have lived?

But these are questions I am making disregarding the children I am working with, the ones confiding me with a life of pain. Why did I look for this? Why do I need to make people characters for my projects? Is it possible to go from my project to our shared project? Once children, such as Angel, have share with me these important parts of his life, how will I facilitate a shared process without exploiting their trauma?

I am also very motivated to discuss my project with the new tutors including Laura Huertas Millán, who will be guiding the Ethics in Documentary seminar. Definitely, the tutors from the Methods seminar will be very helpful as I am interested in documenting the process. 

Thinking about the end product of this project, I wish to avoid an imbalance between the documentation process and a lens-based product that can engage an audience. Facing the uncertain nature of participatory projects (as in a horizontal process in which I gather with children to decide to do an unknown/undefined product under a certain framework), I think next semester once I have documentation and products, I will need to discuss the development and edit of the work with the different tutors at the Piet Zwart Institute.