José De Sancristóbal Questions the Object of the Subject

Upon entering his studio at the Fine Arts Work Center, one might easily imagine that José De Sancristóbal is one of the writing fellows here for the winter. The walls are mostly bare, and two worktables are covered in typed pages. On one table are pages of a text he’s annotating; on the other is something he’s writing for his final project. On top are books: Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Saidiya Hartman. There’s also a small red hardback, Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo’s 1955 masterpiece of early magical realism, a story of the dispossessed against the powerful in which the characters freely traverse the boundaries between life and death.

“It’s a book every Mexican has to read in high school, the novel par excellence of Mexico,” Sancristóbal says.

Not lost among the books and papers are the actual tools of his art: two digital cameras, a small handheld camera, a Super 8 camera, and a laptop, where the splicing and editing are done.

Sancristóbal is very much a visual artist. But his photography and videography installations include language, translation, and text. He is interested in the question of identity, specifically how identity can transcend notions of nationality. He’s into the idea of translatability, which he says is not just about words.