ART CITIES:N.York-Lizania Cruz
Lizania Cruz is a Dominican participatory artist and designer interested in how migration affects ways of being & belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience participation, she creates projects that highlight a pluralistic narrative on migration. Her body of work titled “Investigation of the Dominican Racial Imaginary” examines national and personal archives alongside individual testimonies gathered from the public in order to uncover evidence of the role that historical narrative has played in repressing African heritage within the Dominican Republic.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: CUE Art Foundation Archive
The exhibition “Gathering Evidence: Santo Domingo & New York City” is the second chapter in Lizania Cruz’s ongoing project “Investigation of the Dominican Racial Imaginary”, a body of work in which the artist collects and examines public testimonies alongside individual and national archives in order to understand how Dominicans internalize state-sanctioned historical narratives that result in the repression and erasure of African heritage within the Dominican Republic. Throughout the exhibition, Cruz employs personal and national archives and oral histories as a means to question how the creation and acceptance of the nation-state as an institution formulating identity and belonging reinforces systems of white supremacy within the Dominican racial imaginary. “¡Se Buscan Testigos!” (Looking for Witnesses!), the second part of the project, 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. 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. Each sign bore a poignant question, and question related to the specific context of the outskirts of Santiago and also to the erasure of Black history in Dominican historical memory. 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. 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. 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. In the middle of the room is the installation “The Plaintiffs Records”, produced in collaboration with the organizations Reconoci.do and We Are All Dominican, which includes 20 books composed of 10,000 pages each. Every page represents a birth certificate that was revoked by the Dominican government as a result of La Sentencia, a 2013 ruling issued by the Constitutional Tribunal to uphold other laws/policies that effectively stripped an estimated 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent of their citizenship. Each book also contains a bookmark with a QR code that allows visitors to read a story told by a person who was affected by La Sentencia. “$200 From… To… – With Love” (2019), 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. 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. Consisting of a traveling newsstand, “We the News” (2017- ) 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.
*Gross domestic product (GDP) is the total monetary or market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a specific time period. As a broad measure of overall domestic production, it functions as a comprehensive scorecard of a given country’s economic health.
Photo: Lizania Cruz, ¡Se Buscan Testigos! 9Looking for Witnesses!), Portrait of a Detective in NYC, 2021. Documentation of happening, dimensions variable. Photo: Neha Gautam, © Lizania Cruz, Courtesy the artist and CUE Art Foundation
Info: Curator: Guadalupe Maravilla, CUE Art Foundation, 137 West 25th Street, Ground Floor, Between 6th and 7th Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 22/7-25/8/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://cueartfoundation.org
