Past Resident
Adriana Monsalve
Adriana Monsalve is an artist, cultural worker, and collaborative publisher working in the photobook medium. Along with Caterina Ragg, Monsalve is co-founder of Homie House Press, a radical cooperative platform that challenges the ever-changing forms of storytelling with image and text.
Within her cultural work as a collaborative publisher, she holds space for and with underrepresented communities through the multidisciplinary platform of Homie House Press (HHP); a cooperative playground where fotos become books, a safe space for secret stories, and an open house for honest content that meets at the intersection of personal, political, and poetic. She is rigorously pushing towards finding ways for photographers and publishers to cultivate the capacity for care and tenderness within structures that actively work against their manifestations. She defines intimacy as the experience of being genuinely seen, heard, and held by another person or group of people.
Q&A with Adriana Monsalve (from Crosstown Arts newsletter, July 9, 2020)
Crosstown Arts Spring 2020 artist residency alumnus Adriana Monsalve is an artist, cultural worker, and collaborative publisher working in the photo-book medium.
Along with Caterina Ragg, Monsalve is a co-founder of Homie House Press, a radical cooperative platform that challenges the ever-changing forms of storytelling with image and text. The works of Homie House Press have been collected in the Library of Congress, Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Maryland Institute College of Art, among other private collections. Homie House Press is “a cooperative playground where fotos become books, a safe space for secret stories, and an open house for honest content that meets at the intersection of personal, political, and poetic.”
Within her photographic practice, Monsalve is a storyteller and visual communicator who produces in-depth stories on identity from the angle of race, gender, and immigrant-adjacent experiences.
Adriana earned a Masters in Photojournalism with distinction from the University of Westminster. She was awarded the Lucie Independent Photo Book Prize for her collaborative photo book, Femme Frontera, a project which was funded by the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and was part of the Master Artist Grant.
Crosstown Arts registrar Jesse Butcher caught up with Adriana to discuss her work as a collaborative publisher with Homie House Press, the art of “failing forward,” and her “Clear As Black” project.
Jesse: Your work under the moniker Homie House Press is incredibly impressive. Can you tell me the history and evolution of the project? As a curator and storyteller, how do you begin the process?
Adriana: Homie House Press is a collaborative project that Caterina Ragg and I developed in reaction to our various encounters within the field of photojournalism. We started working together while studying for our masters at the University of Westminster in London. After graduating, we researched channels to tell our stories in the traditional spaces of photojournalism, where we were struck by the regulations of the field, i.e. staying “objective,” keeping a safe distance from ourselves and the story. We found barriers continually rising against us when showing photojournalism institutions our work.
We were bringing in-depth, long-term storytelling that was personal and political at the same time, while the outlets we were in contact with were looking for surface-level, one-dimensional images. Additionally, we faced the problems that arise from a lack of ethnic, racial, and gender diversity, as some of the only womxn and/or womxn of color working in those spaces. Our artistic practice is not here to please the viewer but to challenge them with concepts that we value as meaningful. In a society as divided as ours, the role of the artist is to educate and unpack uncomfortable topics.
After our experiences in these spaces, we decided to decolonize the traditional platform by holding space for personal storytelling and making space for our communities. Thus, HHP was born. HHP serves as an alternative, new-school photojournalism platform that focuses on communities working from within the margins of our society to represent personal experiences as they really are, rather than through the gaze of traditional photojournalism. It combines our passion for photojournalism, storytelling, graphic design, photography, performance art, cultural work, and artivism, as a means of deconstructing the traditional approach.
The real value of our work as artivists, or as artists using our creative practices to seek justice and create social equity, is collaboration. Homie House Press encourages young people and marginalized groups to tell our stories and show ourselves with dignity. Historically, our stories have been told by the people in power; this is one of the reasons our communities are in need of broader and more truthful representations of who we are. This is work that is founded in revisionist history. We are reclaiming our stories and identities and placing immense value on them.
I’m reminded of Anthony Burgess’ quote “People are scared, rightly, of language.” Or The Invisible Committee stating, “Struggles create the language in which a new order expresses itself.” Caterina and yourself began in the traditional world of photojournalism but now seem to be conducting a much larger and intense chronicle. Do you have any advice for others who want to take the courageous leap into curation and publishing?
I feel like I have never known what I am doing when it comes to bookmaking and publishing. I’ve been failing since forever when it comes to making art, let alone being seen in the art world. At some point, I stopped caring or taking it personally and began to practice saying “yes” to everything, especially when I don’t know how to do it.
I’ve learned so much from each project, and honestly the best advice I continue to give myself is: trust the process. A book is not the end result; an exhibition is not either. These ideas are all connected and grow on top of and alongside each other. The process is never ending; thus I’ll never arrive. And although that may be daunting, it brings me peace and comfort in knowing that I am moving through a tradition within creative realms of embracing the unknown and leaning into uncertainty with as much courage as grace. I’ve been intentionally practicing failing forward, and that’s really where masterpieces come from. I do a lot, because I fail a lot, and that’s where I succeed.
I’ve always repeated the “fail better” mantra, but I think “failing forward” is a much more optimistic and true incantation of the artist’s trajectory. What has been inspiring to you lately?
I can definitely tell you what is fueling and exhausting me at the same damn time. The murdering of black folks worldwide, the targeting at black existence, the asinine ways in which we are meant to deal with two plagues at one time. The [coronavirus] may one day dissipate with a vaccine or medical breakthrough, but we’ve never gotten to a place where racism is not a significant part of everyone’s life in the United States.
As we enter Pride month, it goes without saying that we would have nothing without the rebellion of a black trans woman. Black femmes are the fuel for so much of what I do with Homie House Press, and they continue to be the stimulus for so much motivation.
I am currently immersed in sci-fi through multiple mediums. The following works of art have been bringing me back to myself in these dystopic days: Rebecca Sugar: Steven Universe: The Movie and Steven: Future, Octavia Butler: Lillith’s Brood trilogy/Fledgling, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Your work “Clear As Black” features engaging photographs, interviews, and a sublime personal essay. Flipping through the pages online felt cinematic. How did you begin this work?
Clear As Black is a project that I began because I’ve taken up in-between spaces of being for as long as I can remember. This pertains to race, ethnicity, body, sexuality, gender, expression, and spirit. The person I am in the body that I am in is always questioned and has to be proven to the point of being gas-lit. It’s taken many years to get to a place where I am just Adriana, and I understand that I don’t owe you or anyone any further explanation. Within that journey is where Clear As Black was born and began taking shape in me.
It’s been an exploratory space where I can play, fail, and ultimately reimagine all the pieces of me that have historically been hidden, lied about, or pushed away. Clear As Black is first and foremost about challenging anti-Blackness within Latinidad. And really, Latinidad is a term that is no longer useful. It has united us under an illusion of race that never was. We as a people will never fit into any mainstream representation of us because we are not a monolith. The colonizer, the indigenous, and the enslaved all live within this body and have to make peace every day. When you tell me I’m “too this” and “not enough that” to be labeled Latinx, you fall into the chasm of the curse of labels. At Homie House, we are obsessed with identity, and identity is a search for the label/box that you fit in or the label/box that you’re placed into. I am at a place now where I’ve done so much rigorous community work/healing work of investigating that which surrounds identity that I don’t use labels anymore. I’m totally over them. Clear As Black was my initiation into reclaiming myself through collaborative artwork for survival.
Clear As Black is amazing, and I encourage everyone to take the time to consume it. As the Homie House Press revolution never loses momentum, you recently announced a new book with Raisul Tintin. How did this project evolve?
Yes, please take your time with Clear As Black. The entire story is on my website. It’s such a special project, and I am so excited to have been given the opportunity to continue it in Memphis during my residency [at Crosstown Arts] that sadly was interrupted by the pandemic. I am hoping to be back [at Crosstown Arts] in February 2021 to finish what I started with the amazing community that I have fostered in Memphis.
And about Raisul TinTin, I am so excited about this project. This is a collaboration that began in September of last year, and we have been slowly figuring out ways for this to come to fruition at Homie House Press. Raisul is the youngest artist we have ever worked with at 16 years old. It is thrilling and fills me with so much hope to be able to work with youth in ways that are experimental.
[The book] is the coming-of-age story of a Bangladeshi kid growing up in New York. Its about love, celebration, friendship, sisterhood, the loss and finding of home, and evolving memories all put together with photography and poetry. The project is turning into this very romantic journey, not in a complex heavy drama vibe but with the trip-and-fall-and-get-up-again vibe of a teenager. That’s all I’ll say because the book is still under construction. We are hoping to go to print at the end of this month, but with the whirlwind of revolution that we are fully immersed in, we cannot be sure. Either way, this project, entitled Love, Raisul, is a first of its kind for us, and I dare say for the world. Get ready for lots of pink and lots of love.
Thanks so much for your insight, Adriana. This work is fantastic and we look forward to your future projects. Lots of pink and lots of love is very welcome!
