brat winter part 1
Living out of sync
Hello from winter! The sun is slowly coming back (it’s finally light after 6pm), but the southern hemisphere winter (and the funk that comes along with it) is very real. This month especially i’m experiencing the challenges of becoming more fluent in Spanish, but not totally understanding everything that’s being said around me so I sometimes miss things—it’s a tough place to be but thankfully people are supportive when I talk about it. I’m trying to practice patience and gratitude as I navigate some of the harder aspects of this experience.
So, how’s it going? My project in a nutshell:
This week I am at the Fulbright Midterm Seminar in Buenos Aires, where I presented what i’ve been up to for the past four and a half months (so much time and also so little). The collage of photos below sums up so many things: art making, learning, relationship building, protest, friendship, being lost as a foreigner but also finding my place here in small ways, inspiration, and food for thought…
This meme I found sums up art making and “research” as an artist so well:
I drew my own version of the artists process:
I cannot stress enough the importance of relationship building, patience, and flexibility with my time here! Today at the midterm seminar in a breakout group my cohort of fellow researchers talked about how this idea of hitting the ground running is really unrealistic, but it is so engrained into American culture and work ethic. In Argentina, there is more of a relaxed approach to work—an emphasis on connection, sharing information, learning, patience, tranquil (calmness).
Some art:
Inspired by mate culture, friend crushes, romantic crushes, and late night queer europop dance parties, the slogan “se mi cebador” became stuck in my head and I had to get it out somehow.
The cebador / cebedora / cebedore (translates to “feeder”) is the person who pours the hot water into the mate when it is shared between people. Usually an initial one-on-one hang, platonically or romantically, involves a matecito, which means to drink mate and share conversation, hence, asking someone to be your cebador is asking someone to share their mate with you 😉
Anyway, i’m over here trying to figure out how Argentines flirt // estoy acá probando averiguar como flirtean lxs argentinxs 🤔 so I drew this series of mates with pride colors because the gays here love their pride flags 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈
The mate pride color schemes left to right: bisexual, pride flag, lesbian, trans, pansexual, nonbinary, asexual.
OK OK but really if you live in Argentina and wanna drink mate in a park and talk about art and gay shit you should really hit me up! // Dale dale pero bueno si querrés tomar un matecito en un parque y charlar de arte y mierda gay digame! 🧉🌈⚡️
On that note ~ abrazos y besos!
-fío (next blog post will be about why i’m going by fío :-) )