Alex Dolores Salerno and Francisco echo Eraso, Regalos, 2020, Used pillowcase, handspun thread, hair, 94 x 46 inches
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Francisco echo Eraso (he/él) is a disabled, trans, Colombian-American interdisciplinary craft artist, curator, educator, arts administrator, and accessibility consultant. He is interested in grassroots approaches to disability justice, trans liberation, cooperative textiles, and the creative redistribution of resources. His art practice makes evident the construction of value through reproductions and allusions to the color gold and its related histories of mining, capitalist accumulation, decadence, alchemy, and healing practices.
Regalos (“gifts” in Spanish) is a sculptural installation created in collaboration with Alex Dolores Salerno that explores the embodiment of queer-crip time through the ephemera of dreams, rest, and growth between partners. For Regalos, Eraso and Salerno have split open a shared and worn pillowcase where the sweat from sleep has stained both sides of the fabric. Cascading from the pillowcase are handspun golden threads whose collective shape mimics the rectangular space of a bed. Originating from the artists’ practice of gifting their hair to each other, small bundles of hair are tenderly knotted along the lengths of the thread reminiscent of Quipus. The Quipu is a textile made of knotted strings used by pre-Columbian Andean groups to keep records, collect data, and tell stories. Rest, interdependency, and the transcendent space of the bed are here offered as sacred treasures. The collaborative nature of this work speaks to the critical crip tactic of dismantling individual achievement and instead celebrating collective work and collective rest.
Instagram: @realityhasbeenpostponed
franciscoechoerasojr.com