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Ballad of the Uprooted, completed in 2019 for the Sullivan Galleries at SAIC (Chicago), continues research and material experiments first enacted for a Poet's Theater project in 2015 at Sector 2337 (Chicago) and further developed for a solo exhibition, As A Shadow Before the Law, at Ballroom Projects in 2017 (Chicago).
Ballad of the Uprooted uses archival documents and artifacts, alongside architectural constructions that function simultaneously as boundaries, enclosures, and mechanisms of display. As a creative and scholarly production, this installation examines the history of migrant crop labor and the depiction and conscription of agricultural work through policy, political rhetoric, personal narrative, and media representation. This research-based project seeks to complicate settled notions of labor politics, which tend to center the urban and industrial, by taking into account agribusiness, crop working, and the racialization of U.S. labor histories. Topics under consideration include government policies and programs as well as activist organizations, such as the Bracero Program, Operation Wetback, the United Farm Workers Union, and the National Farm Labor Union. In addition, the project poses questions about how crop-oriented political activism developed along migrant labor trails and how crop dusting and pesticide production subjected communities and labor forces of color to racist environmental practices. Furthermore, we examine the ways that creativity has been deployed through El Teatro Campesino (Farm Workers’ Theatre) and migrant song traditions as both tools of communal consciousness raising and ways to generate aesthetic pleasure. Drawing upon archival research conducted in New Mexico and Texas, as well as personal archives and family histories, Ballad of the Uprooted develops parafictional accounts and speculative archives that trace the exploitation of migrant crop workers within a U.S. political and agribusiness framework.
Jeff Nguyen's notes and drawings documenting the performance
As a Shadow Before the Law continues material experiments and performative logics used to display, enclose, and present sculptural elements dealing with the estrangement of Latinx folks within a hegemonic social structure. As a Shadow Before the Law was originally installed at Ballroom Projects.
Press Release:
Nancy Fraser defines misrecognition as the cultural creation “of a class of devalued persons” who are denied full social partnership based on the production of “an institutionalized social relation.” As an injury to social status, misrecognition does not need to be validated through other forms of structural inequality, such as economic and class relations. “Injustices of distribution and injustices of recognition” are interrelated and inseparable. They are two sides of the same harm that would presumably be eliminated from any ethical social sphere. The “stranger” (that figure of misrecognition par excellence) has long-since been construed as a disturbance to highly regulated hegemonic orders. Thus, for Okwui Enwezor, “The human as a ghostly presence . . . marks the separation between those . . . who must seek the status of normalcy for their inclusion into the human family by first exorcizing their strangeness, foreignness, otherness.” This exhibition is an exploration of ghostly presences, the interrelated experiences of symbolic and material alienation, estrangement, and misrecognition within one’s own land, culture, and socio-political milieu.
