Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky September 22, 2021 Artist Statement In the late 1970s I lived in Guayaquil (Ecuador), the city where my mother was born. The contrast between my memories and experiences in Ecuador with my life in the US has been central to my practice, which uses personal narratives as a gateway to explore broader questions of place, identity and nationhood. I tell stories through images, static or moving, often using performance to ground them. My video, “The Perilous Journey of María Rosa Palacios” and series of images, The “Railroad Workers”, draw parallels between my Afro-Ecuadorian great grandmother’s journey through the mountains of Ecuador and the construction of the most dangerous stretches of railway in the world. The project brings attention to Palacios and the railroad workers whose station in life made it impossible for them to be remembered in the history books. My current project, “How to build a wall and other ruins”, absorbs the debates around the engineering feats of Inca architecture at Ingapirca, Ecuador to reimagine labor and its documentation. Like earlier projects this work constructs an expanded history in which I enact these theories and place my body into history as a work of parafiction, a term used to describe an emergent genre of artwork that plays in the overlap between fact and fiction. The work does not pretend to be factual; it is a proposal. It asks, lucidly: What can Inka technology teach us today? As the US grapples with a...

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