About
The co-founders of the Place as Practice Research Collective are Deanna Ledezma (University of Illinois Chicago), Josh Rios (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), and Anthony Romero (Dartmouth College). As a collective, we conduct critical and creative kinship research and produce visual- and narrative-based work. Sites key to these investigations are located in what is now South-Central Texas and the Texas Hill Country, where we were raised and our families reside. Some of our relatives have called this area home for generations, while others have more recently immigrated to this region from Mexico. Our backgrounds as first-generation college students and work as committed educators motivate us to collaborate with relatives and kin, many of whom did not have access to formal education. Together, we recognize our kin as creative practitioners, storytellers, and theorists in their own right.
Our exhibition The place where the creek goes underground was on view at Harvard Radcliffe Institute from September 16 to December 14, 2024.
Writing
Informed by the Latinx/e life writing practices of autobioethnography, testimonio, and autohistoria-teoría, we examine the entanglements of personal experiences and social relationships, familial and collective histories, territory and emplacement.
The place where the creek goes underground included two publications produced by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute: a broadsheet-style exhibition takeaway and a book with nonfiction essays and artwork by Ledezma, Rios, and Romero.
Our book manuscript in progress Kinship Research: An Altar Album takes the form of a multigenre collective memoir with newly produced photographs and images. Building upon the theories of Chicana art historian Laura E. Pérez and artist Amalia Mesa-Bains, our political and creative framework of the altar album references both the practice of ofrenda making and the social materiality of the family photo album. We conceptualize our book as an altar album that documents and commemorates ancestral knowledge systems, resists settler colonial constructions of place, and expands notions of family beyond the biological or the juridical.
Art and exhibition making
Through our research, we find ourselves returning to the places where our interests in object- and image-making originated. Immersed in academia and contemporary art, we have sought to make our intellectual and creative lives known to our families and to create critical space for them to make their lives known to us. Kinship research bridges these falsely compartmentalized spheres: the privileged world of higher education and the places we come from. The formation of the Place as Practice Research Collective gives new language to previous iterations of our creative practices and scholarly inquiries. Through the framework of critical and creative kinship research, we work collaboratively with each other and our relatives to produce video, performance, photography, sound, and nonfiction writing.
ArchivAL RESEARCH
Critical family history, as theorized by Christine Sleeter, guides our archival engagements and interventions. The Place as Practice Research Collective traverses the civic record, the institutional collection, the antique mall, the hallway closet, and the land and its transformed surfaces. We know it matters where memory is kept and by whom and that archives take many forms. An archive may be an instrument of exclusion, where the record is written and kept by dominant classes and in the service of settler colonialism. Our research makes such power dynamics visible and contestable. Seeking counternarratives, we emphasize the everyday experiences and places that tell history from the other side. We foreground the affective and sensorial dimensions of archival study, whether it is a state record, a family photo album, a digital database, or a story told on a drive taken through a familiar terrain.
ONGOING CollaborationS
The establishment of the Place as Practice Research Collective (2023–present) is a continuation of our intersecting collaborations. Through our parallel trajectories in higher education, we have known each other and supported one another’s creative lives since our undergraduate studies at Texas State University. Each of us moved to Chicago where we earned graduate degrees in the arts and learned from the array of dialogues, exchanges, and creative spaces cultivated within and beyond the city.
More formalized collaborations include our contributions to Reworking Labor, a three-part curatorial research project featuring an international symposium (2018), a group exhibition (2019), and an edited volume of essays (2023), organized, curated, and edited by Daniel Eisenberg and Ellen Rothenberg. Ledezma, Rios, and Romero produced the installation Ballad of the Uprooted for the exhibition component. For the Reworking Labor book, Ledezma and Rios co-authored a research-based chapter with a series of photographs about the United Farm Workers Instagram account.
In 2018, Rios, Romero, and Matt Joynt co-founded Sonic Insurgency Research Group (SIRG), a performance and exhibition practice that examines normalized associations between criminality and sound, silencing as a form of social control, and voicing as a form of social resistance.