VIDEO: Artist Insight with Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez

On June, 15 2018 Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez, a resident artist at AS220 in Providence, and RISCA’s 2018 Merit Fellow in Film & Video, sat down with Paris Paris of AS220 galleries to do a short Audio/video artist insight.

Benjamin spoke about their artwork titled “Parachute, (circa 1988 – 2006)” on display at AS220 RES Gallery, detailing the process of creating this artwork, the history of this artwork as a performance artwork and more.

Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez is a Colombian, Providence-based visual artist, performance artist, and educator. Lundberg Torres Sánchez’ recent performance and visual art works emerge from his experiences of being a transnational adoptee from Colombia growing up and living in the U.S. and consider labor and the limits of empathy when working on problems of structural inequity. Lundberg Torres Sánchez’s work has appeared in spaces including but not limited to the Queens Museum, RISD Museum (Providence), Museum of the Moving Image (Queens), PHI Centre (Montreal), The Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts, the Morgan Library & Museum (Manhattan). He is the recipient of NEA funding through AS220’s 2017 Community Live Arts Residency, was RISCA’s 2017 Merit Fellow in New Genres, and is RISCA’s 2018 Merit Fellow in Film & Video.

“Parachute, (circa 1988 – 2006) begins with my mother’s archive of newspaper clippings, collected primarily from the Dallas Morning News, and presented to me when I left home. Compiled under the terms “Colombia” and “Adoption,” these stacks of paper represent moments of cross-temporal communication from a parent to her transnational-adoptee son. Through a process of reselection and reconfiguration within the archive, dormant for nearly a decade, I constructed a 7.5-foot wide parachute in response to Dayanita Singh’s File Room & Shilpa Gupta’s 1278 Unmarked, 28 Hours by Foot via National Highway No 1, east of the Line of Control.

Activated through performance at the Queens Museum, the parachute, in a contemplation of lift and drag, explores the weight of inheritance.” – Words courtesy of the Artist.

The AS220 RES Gallery, at 131 Washington, Providence, RI 02903, is open by appointment only. Please contact the AS220 gallery director Neal Walsh at Neal@AS220.org or Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez at benjofaman@gmail.com, Instagram: @benjofaman. Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez’ “Parachute, (circa 1988 – 2006)  is on display until June 30th including artworks by other AS220 resident artists.