soundpedro 2021 participation: VBODOBV | dEvolution: Personnel
Untitled (Jose)

Angel Alvarado (b. 1992) is a Los Angeles-based digital media and performance artist. His work looks to question notions of gender, sexuality, and agency through the investigation of the commodification of visibility. Situating the Latinx queer experience at the center of his practice and highlighting the dual nature of the internet in expanding visibility and policing bodies, Alvarado employs appropriation as a means to sabotage constructed realities that are fixated on a Eurocentric homogenized and racialized experience. He received his BA in Fine Art at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2015.

Artist Location: Los Angeles, California
Social Media: Artist Website | Instagram

Proposed work as accepted for soundpedro 2021:
Untited (Jose)
This work uses appropriated audio from a 2018 New York Times podcast which recounts the story of an undocumented minor named Jose. Jose and his father were fleeing violence in Honduras but were arrested at the border between Mexico and the United States. He was then forcibly separated from his father due to the racist and inhumane zero-tolerance policy instituted by the Trump administration. The audio is condensed on Jose’s experiences to focus on the inherent trauma that he and many children faced and are currently still facing today. This is juxtaposed with an image of a vaguely celestial being fading into pure white, contrasting the implicit violence of separation and its effect on Jose.

As a child of Latinx immigrant parents, the stories of children being separated from their families at the border has hit me immensely. This work is an attempt to reconcile these stories and to try to provide a temporary space of healing while not skirting around the fact that these children have experienced severe trauma that we as a nation are fully responsible for.

This work in its current iteration exists as a looped video piece. For this show, I am happy to have it seen as is or to expand on it as an audio piece to fit the show's themes.