This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Lizania Cruz: Gathering Evidence: Santo Domingo & New York City, curated and mentored by Guadalupe Maravilla and on view at CUE Art Foundation from July 16 – August 26, 2021. This text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE.
Lizania Cruz, ¡Se Buscan Testigos! [Looking for Witnesses!], 2021. Documentation of happening, dimensions variable.
In a recent lecture, Lizania Cruz explained––with a smile on her face––that as an artist, she intentionally relinquishes control. [1] It is not a factor she is particularly interested in because control does not serve the function of her work. Instead, she thinks through modalities of agency and intent. Her practice is grounded in the notion that participation is a tool that should always center people first, and not the art. Noting this careful distinction, I cite Cruz’s own words: “Art can be a catalyst for change, but there are material conditions that art can never really provide for.” Participation in art encourages critical thought, action, and change, slowly seeping from the symbolic realm to lived, material realities.
Cruz’s work asks us to really consider what public history fundamentally is. How is a public history documented and distributed over time? Who controls access to history, which in turn shapes public ideology? What, in other words, are the real-life stories of people that have evaded the institutional historiographies of an Empire? And finally, how can art as intervention be a catalyst or seed for the creation of entirely new, alternative archives of understanding? Cruz’s work firmly positions a public, or the lived realities of people, as diametrically opposed to the historiographic tendencies of official record keepers. Cruz’s projects expose the hollow symbolism and rhetoric of a state that has fundamentally failed its people, and of global nation-states that cyclically violate basic thresholds for humanity through unimaginably horrific means.
Lizania Cruz, ¡Se Buscan Testigos! [Looking for Witnesses!], 2021. Documentation of happening, dimensions variable.
Although some of Cruz’s works address histories specific to the Dominican Republic––her home country––and others are contextualized in New York City––the site she has called home for years––all of the works acknowledge that a single nation’s history is inevitably entangled with the histories of many others. This is conveyed by the many immigrants to the U.S. whose stories are now recorded in her multimedia project We the News (2017-ongoing), the narratives of Dominicans, Haitians, and United Statesians that are recorded in her investigation ¡Se Buscan Testigos! [Looking for Witnesses!] (2020-21), and the data she gathered in $200 From... To... - With Love (2019). The work suggests that you cannot tell Dominican history without acknowledging Haiti’s successful rebellion, or Spain’s violent conquest, or U.S. military occupations. Similarly, you cannot tell U.S. history without acknowledging that part of it was once Mexico, and is today shaped by the shadow of the institution of slavery as well as recent contributions from immigrants from all over the world. Cruz’s work suggests that a more complete archive should allow the public access to histories that have been obscured and unrecorded. If these archives do not exist, they can be created meaningfully, through participation and dialogue.
Through collective participation in her work, Cruz re-incorporates the public in the archive. Sometimes the archival contributions are messy, casual, or unofficial, yet they offer an irreverence that is more necessary today than any other dominant archive. This participation dissolves the inherent authority of hegemonic ideologies and re-vindicates the public in the archive, while building authentic historical memory. Cruz is simultaneously contesting existing archives, and perhaps more importantly, creating entirely new experiential ones where the main purpose is re-engaging and re-contextualizing the public through direct inclusion.
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1. $200 From... To... - With Love, 2019
$200 From... To... - With Love is a project that considers how global economies of remittances operate at different scales and speeds, and how they are illustrative of global power dynamics through flows of capital from the top-down. Inviting visitors to Recess Art in Brooklyn, NY during her Session artist residency in 2019, Cruz requested their receipts from recent purchases and later recorded and translated them to their equivalent currency value in one of the countries that receives large amounts of remittances from the U.S. For example, in the U.S., $5 worth of popcorn at the movie theater is equivalent to the purchase of 13 kg of fresh corn in Honduras. The tension of this steep contrast is depicted in a series of monochromatic yellow collages, with illustrations of food and fragments from printed receipts.
$200 From... To... - With Love questions how value, and thus power, fluctuates with currency flows. In a final action, Cruz collected 25 receipts, calculated their total in USD, and measured their equivalent value with the cost of rice in Haiti. She then filled a large sack with rice, and mailed it to the Washington D.C. office of the Director of USAID in Haiti. Stamped on the sack was a note: “Is aid working as we’d hope?” She never received a response. In an artist statement, Cruz underscores that in 2017, global development aid reached a new peak at 162 billion dollars. This is just a fraction compared to the 500 billion dollars immigrants send home annually in remittances. In Haiti, remittances alone comprise 32.4% of Haiti’s GDP. These numbers illustrate how migration, labor flows, and neoliberal policies affect the livelihoods of everyday people.
In Cruz’s action, the sack of rice reminds us of physicality and scale. In some countries, like Haiti and the Dominican Republic, a sack of rice is gifted by a politician to a person in a village, a symbolic gift in exchange for a vote. A sack of rice is food to feed a family. A sack of rice is a micro-level universe, a collection of grains that tells a complex story about migration, capital, and labor. What if we imagine a sack of rice to be an archive?
2. We the News, 2017-ongoing
Consisting of a traveling newsstand, We the News is an ongoing production of zines, workshops, and other publications documenting the narratives of Black immigrants in the U.S. and first-generation Black Americans. Participants are encouraged to voice their stories, which Cruz records, transcribes, and edits. Oral histories are transferred to writing, and form part of a mobile material archive of diasporic understanding. Sometimes, the writings are translated into different languages, increasing their potential accessibility.
We the News exists in public spaces, and is made by its participants. It is anti-hierarchical and gathers narratives that would perhaps never be officially recorded in the first place, that evade official historiographies and institutional surveys. It is free for everyone and attempts to explain the complex, constant negotiations of identity that Black immigrants face in the U.S., a country whose legacies of racism are entrenched in all aspects of public and private life.
In a true attempt at radical dispersal, the newsstand is mobile and on wheels. We the News reminds me of informal architectures of the Caribbean, like pulga stands covered with bright blue tarp, engineered out of great necessity and resourcefulness and requiring ongoing participation, patience, and care. What if we consider how these mobile stands function simultaneously as archives, meetup spots, and story circles, irreverently situated outdoors in public space, announcing themselves in bright colors?
3. ¡Se Buscan Testigos!, 2020-21
¡Se Buscan Testigos! is a component of La Investigación del Imaginario Racial Dominicano (IIRD) [Investigation of the Dominican Racial Imaginary], which takes the form of a criminal investigation that seeks testimonies from witnesses to indict the Dominican state in archival and historical violence, specifically, in the erasure of Black identity from the Dominican racial imaginary. This project radically reconsiders who is allowed to contribute to historical memory, and privileges direct narratives from the general public. IIRD is a makeshift institutional archive created by Cruz, consisting of a comprehensive data-filled website, a logo, and business cards. These elements give the project a sense of bureaucratic authority, and an official aesthetic that challenges the inherent authority of dominant channels of information.
In her first intervention in Santiago de los Caballeros, Cruz installed signs along specific streets, placed ads in classified sections of local papers, and announced the survey over loudspeaker in a moving car. [2] Each sign bore a poignant question, like “¿Cuándo y dónde baila usted música con influencias Africanas; Salsa, Merengue, Bachata?” [3] Each question related to the specific context of the outskirts of Santiago and also to the erasure of Black history in Dominican historical memory. [4] Accessible via the website of IIRD, the collected responses make up a digital archive of voice notes and Whatsapp messages. Responses from the Santiago intervention capture a popular discourse of anti-Black racism, shared among both Dominicans and Haitians, most often verbalized as anti-Haitianism.
Other responses, however, are more complex, and illustrate how members of the public are thinking critically about dominant narratives of colonial imperialism. A question about Christopher Columbus’s true history received one 15-minute voice note as a response, in which the author states: “Todo lo que nos han dicho [...] sobre Cristóbal Colón, [...] el 95% [...] ha sido totalmente falso. [...] La historia la cuenta el sobreviviente, es decir, aquel que gana, aquel que termina conquistando lo que quiere.” [5] This testimony is recorded and becomes crucial evidence in Cruz’s investigation. It affirms an ideology of questioning and suggests: what if there is a difference between what actually occurred and what has been said to have occurred? [6] How might our collective verbalized doubts make up a new, dynamic archive of the now?
Cruz’s second iteration of ¡Se Buscan Testigos! is bilingual and took place in Dominican neighborhoods of New York City. This specific iteration considers if and how the experience of diasporic migration shifts public discourse and popular ideology, given that Dominican Black identity is often re-contextualized and re-negotiated after the experience of migration and racialization in a U.S. context. [7] In this iteration, Cruz’s questions include allusions to U.S. invasions of the Dominican Republic, as well as the legacies of Juan Bosch, Rafael Trujillo, and Joaquín Balaguer. The questions also underscore the reasoning behind mass migration, and how flows of labor and capital between the U.S. and the D.R. are inextricably linked. [8] In this line of questioning and search for people to act as witnesses, power is moved back into the hands of the people. How does the experience of migration shift one’s sense of self, of home, and most importantly, of one’s place in the world? Is there an archive that adequately reflects xenophobic microaggressions, the exhaustion of a 12-hour shift driving for Uber, or the distant sounds of salsa playing until four in the morning?
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Cruz’s projects do not reside within any institution. Most of her artworks can only be experienced with a body, with a voice, with agency, and in public space. The physical components in the exhibition are simply documentation, thoughts, and fragments of an experience that is continually ongoing elsewhere. The work incurs its meaning through dispersion, through its reverberations in the atmosphere, and how those whispers touch many lives, slowly shifting with the environment. Cruz’s practice can be characterized as a kind of archival and institutional rebellion. She once explained: “I can use the archive as a way to recontextualize history today.” [9] Her work seems to suggest that doing so, revealing the truths of today, requires an irreverence for the top-down authority of the archive itself. Cruz’s archival subversions question the hegemony embedded within official records.
A river is an archive of violence, as René Philoctète beautifully illustrates in his 1989 novel Massacre River. A body is an archive of dissent, as Johan Mijail writes in her Manifiesto Antirracista (2018). A street is an archive of experiences, as Cruz suggests in her participatory practice. Archives are proof that we exist––that we are, in fact, alive, although it sometimes does not feel that way. An archive is a way of acknowledging the undeniable presence of our collective ghosts and hauntings in daily life. It cannot exclude the people because it is shaped by the public.
[1] Lizania Cruz, Objects & Methods Lecture Series, Virginia Commonwealth University, VCU Arts, Zoom, March 25, 2021.
[2] The signs are installed in sites related to the history they are questioning. For example, Cruz installed signs at el Pico Diego de Ocampo, named after a formerly enslaved cimarrón who rebelled and freed various plantations in the early 16th century. He was eventually captured and executed by the Spaniards in 1546.
[3] “When and where do you dance to African-influenced music: Salsa, Merengue, Bachata?”
[4] All of Cruz’s questions are informed by in-depth archival research led by the artist, specifically in the archives of el Fondo Fradique Lizardo de Folklore Dominicano at El Centro León.
[5] “Everything we have been told about Christopher Columbus, 95% of it has been totally false. History is told by the survivor, by those who win, by those who end up conquering everything they desire.”
[6] Silvio Torres-Saillant, "The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity." Latin American Perspectives 25, no. 3 (1998): 126-46. The tension of archival or historical omission and erasure is outlined by Silvio Torres-Saillant in his essay “The Tribulations of Blackness” (1998), a foundational text that has informed Cruz’s research.
[7]Also discussed by Silvio Torres-Saillant in Introduction to Dominican Blackness (New York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, 2010).
[8] These flows are discussed in Ramona Hernandez, The Mobility of Workers Under Advanced Capitalism: Dominican Migration to the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
[9] Lizania Cruz in conversation with the author, March 17, 2021.
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.
Alex Santana is a contemporary art criticism writer and curator with an interest in conceptual, political, participatory art and curatorial studies. Originally from Newark, NJ, she is a child of immigrants from Spain and the Dominican Republic, and is deeply committed to social equity, access, and liberation, especially in the arts. She has held research positions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington D.C.), the Newcomb Art Museum (New Orleans, LA), and Mana Contemporary (Jersey City, NJ). In 2018, she curated the exhibition Morir Soñando at Knockdown Center (Queens, NY), and since then has collaborated with artists and curators on other independent projects, including a DIY summer lecture series, Artists on Artists.
Mentor Leticia Alvarado is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Brown University. She is a past recipient of a Smithsonian Latino Studies Predoctoral Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and an American Association of University Women American Fellowship. Her book, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2018), received honorable mentions from the 2019 Latin American Studies Association Latino/a Studies Section Outstanding Book Award and the Modern Language Association Book Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. Her essays and articles have appeared in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Cultural Criticism, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Thought, ASAP/Journal, the art museum catalogue Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., and are forthcoming in Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies and The Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media. Her current book project, Cut/Hoard/Suture: Aesthetics in Relation, is supported by the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program.