A portrait of my pal Jorge Lozano, begun at our A Space gallery exhibition as he talks the talk inside our projections. His outsider immigrant frames underline a marriage of art and politics, forever searching for new approaches that will birth new ideas. Along the way, he muses on the backdrop of his ongoing experimentalisms (150 movies and counting), moments of which punctuate his address. The first version was finished in 2020, new shooting began a couple of years later, along with the uncovering of secret photos and a deeper dive into the artist’s archive. Jorge closes with an unrehearsed and deeply felt take on race and the unending wound of “where are you from?”

Closer by Alexandra Gelis and Jorge Lozano (2024)

Jorge: Seeing all these photographs and moving images of myself I wonder: who is that person? This film is about the connection of parts and fragments. It’s like going into a tunnel of myself when I am not myself but am multiple selves. (laughs) In terms of imagery, it’s an explosion of possibilities, naming and techniques. I feel closest to the conversation about being an immigrant, how immigrant production happens and why it is political.

Many thoughts are incomplete. I’m left with the desire to expand them, to clarify why we are all racists. It’s an interesting discussion we all need to have. If people who judged me because of my appearance saw this film, they would see that I am a complex person. There are many times when I have been denied, misinterpreted, attacked or made invisible. You are a witness to that in the art community here.

When we talk about racism, maybe we should talk about whiteness as a policy of colonial domination and capitalism. That’s what whiteness is. The problem we have here in Canada is that it’s sometimes necessary to defend our identity, to say we exist… but at some point we need to go beyond identity into a politics of care and vulnerability and somatic relations. What people without power can do is create solidarities.

Alexandra: Gracias. The film is a poetic journey where we meet a complexity that is somehow one person who keeps transforming through migration, who transforms spaces and is transformed by them.

Jorge: That's why in Thoughts From Below (2019) I talk about bombing in Syria because I can feel it. I come from a country where people have been bombed. My family was displaced. Being in touch creates a solidarity of care.

Alexandra: You start with a photo of little Jorge (as a child) with that strong gaze. Where are we going to go? This is a portrait of a person fighting for a voice, identity and space for the past 40 years as an immigrant in Canada. You see he’s aligned with the queer community, workers, artists, and close to the drug war politics in South America. He fights by putting together films in a prolific and ongoing conversion of experience into poetic forms.

Jorge: Making film is a kind of architecture, especially experimental films, because they’re inhabited by our voices. It’s not like fiction. Fiction cannot live without stereotypes. The characters are all parts of a type—good or bad. Experimental films don’t represent stereotypes or incomplete personas but personal processes. The history of experimentalities is an exploration of selves. Experimental films are queer, they are trans-forming, trans-formational. They are about desiring differently, making and living differently. And now, at last, we have digital platforms that invite non-binary practices and understandings as a modality, as a container. Not that they’re used that way.

Alexandra: Digital tech, even AI, invites malleability and transformation without destruction.

Jorge: It’s not about creating fixed identities but incomplete becomings. Life is experimental.