Description
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Tres Niños y Una isla by Claudio Mir
digital photo/digital print
8 x 10 inches
Year created: 2019
Description: Three young dark-skinned male friends with their arms around each other. In the background is a young girl with her hair in braids and beads, wearing a blue blouse and brown pinafore, sitting slightly out of the frame and looking down. The boy on the left, wearing a white t-shirt, and the boy in the middle wearing a blue shirt are staring at the camera pensively while the boy on the right, also dressed in a blue shirt is smiling at someone off-camera to his right.
Connection to the theme: In a rural community in the Dominican Republic, 30 kilometers from the border with Haiti, Haitian and Dominican kids play in school, creating bonds that go beyond self-hate and nation-state politics.
Artist Statement: For a long time, my work has revolved around issues of migration and the state of mind of the migrant. What happens to the person who leaves family, friends, sites, and home and decides to move to another place or another country speaking a different language? In Spanish, there is an old saying, "Irse, es morirse," which translates as to leave is to die. For the people we leave behind, one is dead, a sort of soft death; for me, leaving created a sensation of tabula rasa, a new beginning, erasing everything from before and starting anew, but leaving this never-ending sense of longing and regrets, at times, and the sensation, at other times, that I made the right decision to leave. It is a limbo; the body is in one place, the mind is in another. In my work, I tried to conjure all these feelings into one performance piece with music, images, videos, writing, and photographs; sometimes, I succeeded.
Bio: Claudio Mir is a performance artist, photographer, musician, and writer. He received a Professional Actor Degree from La Escuela Nacional de Arte Dramatico, Palacio de Bellas Artes, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He studied theater direction at the International School of Latin American and Caribbean Theater (EITALC) in Bologna, Italy, and Havana, Cuba. Mr. received his bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts, New Brunswick, NJ, in 1999 and a Master's in Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Rutgers University Graduate School, Newark, NJ, in 2012. Mir has participated in collective exhibitions in Aaron Davis Hall, New York, Mason Gross Galleries, New Jersey, the University of Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He is also the founder of Son de Aqui, Son de Alla, a group of Son Jarocho, music from the southern part of Veracruz, Mexico.
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