Marie Alarcón

Marie will develop a project using virtual and augmented reality technologies, such as Google Cardboard VR (Virtual Reality) to document and share stories about the displacement process. This project, in collaboration with Bartrams Village residents, will creatively explore modes of resistance using dance, interviews, and guided tours of the area.

Marie plans to use their residency to curate exhibitions on diaspora, migration, and belonging, creating a space for fruitful public conversations on topics that affect all people of color in the United States. Organized around a performance by Marie as Papi Leon in collaboration with multimedia performance group SWARM, and new work by multidisciplinary artist Petra Floyd,– the exhibit will ask questions about race, belonging, history and trauma using artifacts and artworks to activate the space. The series aims to explore the many processes that QTPOC artists use to work through diasporic experience. 

Performance will include Papi Leon, a diasporic demigod, who uses incantations to call to the lost children of multiculturalism and Petra Floyd, who will present a performative lecture about first-generation dance anxieties. The SWARM collective will close the exhibition with a performance and installation using movement, projections, and experimental instrumentation to further look at a POC centered understanding of diaspora. A public workshop on diasporic culture will be announced in June.

Marie Alarcon will attend the Flaherty Film Seminar at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. Flaherty is a week-long event where filmmakers gather to watch a body of work curated around specific themes and subject matter and participate in active discussion. After completing a 10-month community engagement project that culminated in a multi-channel video installation and 35-minute experimental documentary, Marie looks to connect with other filmmakers who are attempting to push boundaries around form, shaped by ethics of race, class and gender identity. 

Marie will facilitate a six-week program culminating in a video created by youth that utilizes the drop-in resources of the Youth Health Empowerment Project (Y-HEP).  The projects will depict personal stories of the youth in highly creative ways, such as animation, dance and skits in their own eyes and voices. By creating these artistic video documents the youth will be directly addressing the missing representations of themselves among their communities and mass media.