Alán Peláez López

Alán Peláez López

DESCRIPTION

Afro-Indigenous poet and installation artist Alán Peláez López offers us Historia Futura / Future Story, a new text written for [MS]:RU in Spanish and English, envisioning the creation stories of a world without borders: perhaps these words themselves hold within their lines the “[q]uiet, quiet tunes with instructions of how to offer and accept care.”

ARTIST BIO

Alán Peláez López is an AfroIndigenous poet, installation and adornment artist from the coastal Zapotec community of Oaxaca, México. At UC Berkeley, Alan is pursuing a Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies, where he examines the ways in which undocumented Black immigrants create art spaces as a form of political protest that resist notions of Black citizenship and illegality. Much of the artist’s work is invested in thinking with and through fugitivity, language, grief, ancestral memories, and the role of storytelling in migrant households. Pelaez Lopez is the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award, and to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020). Their poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and “Best of the Net,” and selected to appear in Best New Poets 2019 and Best American Experimental Writing 2020. Pelaez Lopez has been building with undocumented queer and trans migrants for ten years.

Exhibition Photography © EFA Project Space/Yann Chashanovski