TEAM

Valeria Meiller, Editor

Valeria is an Argentine writer and academic who works at the intersection of art, the environment, and Latin America. Valeria is renowned for her original, dynamic approach to biennials, exhibitions, and publications. Her poetic and academic work analyze urgent ecological issues from a cultural studies perspective. She lives between New York and Texas, where she is Assistant Professor of Social and Environmental Challenges in Latin America at the University of Texas at San Antonio. 

www.valeriameiller.com
@valeria_meiller

Valeria was born in the Callvú Leuvú basin. Translated into Spanish as “arroyo azul” or “blue stream,” the name refers to the hue that the reflection of the blue flowers on the shore gave to the river, and was the one given to the area by the Querandí. She lived on a cattle ranch, founded on expropriated land in 1831 by the “local justice of the peace”, an illegitimate son of Belgrano adopted by Rosas. There, her paternal great-grandfather planted a eucalyptus forest, as well as a grove to shade the cows, dug irrigation canals, and built mills. She grew up among horses and fruit trees, gathering peaches, plums and blackberries in the summer, and walnuts and persimmons in autumn. She witnessed the transition from traditional methods of crop cultivation, in which wheat, sunflower and pastures transmuted the flat line of the landscape into different colors, as they became supplanted by soybean monoculture: almost phosphorescent green, an illusion of the accelerated, devastating use of agrochemicals. She later moved to large cities where the sky is scarcely seen, though every so often she would happen upon Orion’s belt at night. She has lived in both Buenos Aires and New York, where one comes across rural landscapes only in museums, but she nevertheless continues to write about indomitable silence, etched by wildfire into the pampas.

Whitney DeVos, Editor

Whitney is a writer, scholar, editor, and translator specializing in literatures of the hemispheric Americas. Her work focuses on how, historically, poetic production has contested settler epistemologies, historiographies, temporal frameworks, racial formations, and cultural narratives. Much of her current translation work focuses on autochthonous languages of the hemispheric Americas, Nahuatl in particular. An assistant poetry editor for Asymptote journal, and a reader for POETRY magazine, she lives in Mexico City.

www.whitneydevos.com
@whitnefied

Whitney was born and raised on the occupied ancestral lands of the Gabrielino Tongva peoples, whose homeland Tovaangar includes both the San Gabriel Valley and greater Los Angeles basin in California. The Tongva language is part of the Uzo-Aztecan language group, and shares the same root as Nahuatl spoken in Āltepētl Mēxihco and the Anahuac basin, where Whitney currently calls home. Coyoacán, where she has lived for the past several years, is part of the Texcoco-Zumpango sub-basin of the Moctezuma river basin, once part of Lake Xochimilco before it was drained during Spanish colonization.

Javiera Pérez Salerno, Editor

Javiera was born in Tandil, in a house that lies at the foot of the mountains. As a child, she believed all peoples of the world lived like that, without horizon. Then she discovered the pampas, where she often sensed the absence of an immense gray cutting into her faroff gaze. Later, she moved to Buenos Aires and for many years forgot about her natal landscape, yet she always held the conviction that any time a road begins to incline, one has no choice but to ascend. A few summers ago, as the wind blew through a grove of eucalyptus leaves, she was reminded of her origins. Today she lives between the mountains and the city, accepting that we are simultaneously both singular and multitude, a hybrid being existing somewhere between the magnetic pull of the metropolis and the deep mystery of nature.

Clarisa Chervin, Design

Clarisa is a graphic designer who received her degree from the University of Buenos Aires. Her work focuses on publishing projects, branding and web, especially those related to arts and culture. She is a team member of the Visual Identity Direction with the University of San Martín, and co-directs the publishing project Espuma Editora.

www.clarisachervin.com
@clari.chervin

Clarisa was born and raised in Buenos Aires, a port city with an elusive relationship to its river and waterways. Throughout its history, local streams have been redirected to prevent flooding, and encroaching urbanization projects on both coasts have contributed to the erasure of the original landscape. Yet she also harbors a close relationship with the Paraná River, which she has visited on numerous trips to Corrientes province, where her father was born. There, by way of contrast, the river is part of the daily landscape of the city, integrating urban life with nature.

Analía Iglesias, Art

Analía Iglesias is known as @afroana_ on social networks. One might say she became a collagist by chance, a saxophonist through the musical heritage of her ancestors, and a multimedia artist by following a constant urge to venture into new forms of expression. She began her exploration of herself as an artist and visual designer through various forms of collage, illustration, and animation. Designers say she is very much a visual artist and, visual artists, that she is very much a designer, so she just says that she likes to create universes full of color, infinite curiosity, and love. Her work is a mixture of graphic art, illustration, and collage.

Analía uses digital art as a form of storytelling, one that proudly centers the ancestrality she dwells within. A powerful means of social critique, all art, she believes, should be politically committed to our collective experience. Her work takes Afrofuturism as its primary axis, a way of breaking with capitalist schemas of evolution and progress, and of understanding where we come from in order to know better than ever where we are headed. This quest, grounded in her African and indigenous roots, combines media, research, and the arts in order to convey–and materialize–the idea of an Ancestral Future.