“Un día como hoy (A day like today)”
Video 00:10:14
Through experimental audiovisual poetics, text, installation, and works on paper, I reflect on the lack of trust in record-keeping that validates the consideration of the subjective testimonial as truth, since fact and fiction are blurred even through “official” standards.
The video Un día como hoy is taking the lived experience of a person that society does not deem as extraordinary and claims simplicity as an epic existence, consequentially acknowledging that constructed hierarchical structures have skewed our perceptions, and what is real is what is felt. The recollection of how we process and remember an event we experienced first hand is the evidence needed for every future generation to understand its repercussions, to envision alternatives, and to carry forward a new consciousness.
A boundless world is not shaped by forgetting, rather by increasing the volume of the past in the ways that it is relevant to the present. My grandmother was part of the non-consensual clinical trials in Puerto Rico of the first US birth control pills and forced sterilization in the 1950s. It is a historical reminder of our current moment, as evidenced by the recent news of the forced sterilization of immigrant women by ICE.
Natalia Almonte
(b.1988) is a Brooklyn-based artist and independent curator born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons, The New School and an MA in Art History and the Art Market: Modern and Contemporary Art from Christie’s Education. Almonte has participated in group exhibitions in galleries such as Smack Mellon (2020) and Westbeth Gallery (2019) in New York, as well as solo shows in ÁREA: Lugar de Proyectos (2017) and La Guarda Coche (2019) in Puerto Rico. She co-curated an exhibition at the Arnold & Sheila Aronson Galleries (2020) in Manhattan and is also co-curating an exhibition at The Real House (2021) in Brooklyn. The artist has two upcoming residencies in Mexico and France (2021) and was recently nominated for the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship (2021). Her practice questions the authority of language and the power of verbal manipulation, a reality faced by colonial entities that seldom dictate their own story and are subject to the mercy of the empire’s archives. She considers that the subjective testimonial reveals more about the true repercussions of our sociopolitical climate than “official” documentation.