Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez
Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez (they/them/elle in Spanish, pronounced ay-yay) (b. 1987, Bogotá) uses their art & facilitation to transform individual witness into collective action. As a queer, transnational adoptee, their work resists ways the state hijacks individual & collective bodies to fulfill performances of power across imaginary borders & boundaries. Benjamin is joining Hi-ARTS as a SKY LAB Artist in Residence. During their time, they will employ their creative practices as an invitation for folks to consider systems of family regulation, surveillance, and policing. Programming will include panel discussions, social media engagement, and a “family dinner”.
Lundberg Torres Sánchez’s work has been shown in the U.S. at the Queens Museum, Museum of the Moving Image, The Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts, RISD Museum, and the Knockdown Center to name a few. Their work has been presented internationally in Montreal, Mexico City, Santiago de Querétaro, São Paulo, Lima, and La Paz. They are the founder of the performance and exhibition series, Se Aculilló?, and the co-founder of You Are Holding This: an abolitionist zine for and by adopted and fostered people. Lundberg Torres Sánchez was the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts 2017 and 2018 Merit Fellow in New Genres and Film & Video respectively.
Collaboration that comes from socializing and building relationships over time is the center of my joy in creative practice.
“In art-making, education, and organizing I seek ways to transform what individuals can know and witness alone toward collective action together. As a person who was separated from my first family through a transnational adoption process, I desire to co-create and hold spaces that encourage directly impacted people to express the truth to power by standing together in shared knowledge and practice. This has been a primary way of communicating to myself and others that we are whole and worthy. To me, holding this truth is what allows us to take action. To that end, performance allows my body to be a site for public encounters that allow temporary communities to think, reflect, respond, and act together.
In my time as a SKY LAB artist in residency, I want to use my creative practices as an invitation for folks to consider systems of family regulation, surveillance, and policing: institutions and practices that impact adopted, fostered, and trafficked people (in childhood and adulthood,) as well as parents, and other kin — all who face the threat and reality of family separation at the hands of the state and organized money, public and private.”
— Benjamin Lundgerg Torres Sánchez
Image credit: © 2019 Pittsburgh Performance Art Festival