A HINGE IN DIASPORIC TIME
Luis Arnías navigates Black diasporic histories across the Atlantic, linking memory with collective experiences
ISSUE 1: THE UN/MAKING ISSUE
In this conversation, Arnías speaks with Abigail Satinsky, Program Officer and Curator for Arts & Culture at Wagner Foundation, based in Cambridge, MA, which supports artists and arts organizations that transform our understanding of social change. Arnías and Satinsky worked together on “Slow Loops,” a solo exhibition of Arnías’s work, on view at Wagner Foundation Gallery through March 2025 and traveling to the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts from April to July 2025.
The exhibition connects two of Arnías’s recent films, Bisagras (2024) and Noise Cloud (2025) in an installation that also includes sculpture and drawing. Bisagras, a high contrast black-and-white film where Arnías relates the film’s emulsion to his skin, is an impressionistic record of Arnías’s visits to the House of Slaves in Gorée Island, Senegal, and the port of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, major sites of the transatlantic slave trade where the artist imagines his ancestors’ histories. Noise Cloud is an experimental film that Arnías started during the COVID-19 pandemic, inspired by how public parks became heightened grounds for protests, parties, and leisure across racial lines in a time of crisis. Together, the two films comprise a study of Black life in all of its exuberance and expansiveness, and of the slow and ongoing effects of structural racism and colonization across locations, contexts, and time.
Luis Arnías: I’m originally from Caracas, Venezuela. I’ve lived half my life in Venezuela and half my life in the United States—this is actually the first year that I've spent more time in the United States. This is important because it affects how I see the world and how I connect to both my homeland and this country. When I was little, I was a strange kid. I never thought I wanted a job; I just wanted a vocation. My parents are both educators, and I felt like I needed to find something at a social level to dedicate myself to. Art became that for me.
As a student, I studied writing and philosophy, but then I fell in love with the medium of photography, specifically street photography. Initially I was influenced by artists such as Nan Goldin and William Eggleston. I was captivated by the idea of people just out there taking photos—of their environments, their friends, their lives. I was thinking about moving my body in the streets and capturing what caught my eye. I’m not good at making stuff up, but I’m really good at editing things out, at saying not this, not that, not this. With exercise and practice, I began to understand what kinds of things I’m attracted to visually, and I turned increasingly to 16mm film.
Why and how do you begin a film? What attracts you to particular subjects, ideas, and ways of thinking?
I’m very physical in terms of how I understand things; walking is important to my process. I take my camera outside and start walking toward transitional spaces, borders, frontiers, and bodies of water—places where one thing becomes another. This includes physical borders, like where a river or street ends at the ocean, and social borders, such as redlined areas in Boston, or places where you should or shouldn’t be if you’re a person of color.
And then certain themes emerge: immigration and identity, especially multiculturalism and Blackness. For example, growing up, I had a nickname in my house, which was “Negro” but with an “–ito,” to make it diminutive and cute: Negrito. But then when I came to the United States for university, somehow I wasn’t that anymore; I was often seen by people in my communities, whether that was my neighbors or the academic institutions I was participating in, as a “Latin” person and not Black. But authorities, especially cops, have always seen me as Black, which makes me a suspect to them.
I had an encounter here in Boston while I was teaching where I was out taking pictures in one of those in-between spaces and the authorities were called on me because I was seen as suspicious and a threat. This all made me understand that I am part of two different systems of Blackness, one that I experienced in Venezuela, where it was always part of my identity, and another in the United States, where it primarily marked me as a kind of a threat. Though Blackness in both places is complex, the levels of violence here felt completely different. I’m still figuring these things out for myself, in part through my work.
I take my camera outside and start walking toward transitional spaces, borders, frontiers, and bodies of water—places where one thing becomes another.
Experimental film and avant-garde film are terms associated with single-channel moving image projects shot in film stock. Frankly, I feel remote from those definitions of the past of working in the celluloid medium. I feel more aligned with video art as a term, but the medium is a hard wall that separates these ideas.
Experiments have a scientific association. As I said, I start most of my work by walking and observing intensely. It begins with allowing intuition a chance to exist when I recognize a possible shot. The framing and duration of the shot contributes to the meaning. I do this with sequential shots, considering their form and meaning to create a complete roll of film—this is called in-camera editing. Each roll of film is one hundred feet, which is two minutes and forty-five seconds. It is important to me to not be wasteful and to not repeat a shot. While waiting for the film to be processed in the lab, which takes about a week, I make drawings in the studio, mapping the possible ideas emerging from the felt but unseen images in the roll.
I do in-camera editing as carefully as possible, but meaning and an emotional core are created by editing beyond that first stage. Moving images are enigmatic and highly detailed, but they offer no content on their own. Editing the images and sound offers me a way to use time as a medium to express the feelings attached to each project. To me, it is more important to have an empathic connection with the audience watching the final film rather than intellectual clarity.
When I visited your studio a few months back, you talked a lot about the vacant lot next to your house, the neighbors who use it, and how you have staged some scenes there. What’s important to you about that space?
It’s a magical place. It’s actually three vacant lots, so it’s substantial enough to feel like a small forest or park. But it’s unkempt, and there’s an empty house where raccoons live, and a lot of possums, and a groundhog that is friends with a cat—nature coexists with the city. I’ve filmed there a lot, especially for my last film, Noise Cloud, but it’s also used by the kids from the nearby high school, who go there to smoke weed before class, or to find romance and hold hands. It’s an undefined space, and because of that, it is highly active, not only in terms of humans, but also the flow of nature.
Editing the images and sound offers me a way to use time as a medium to express the feelings attached to each project.
Noise Cloud is an experimental film I started in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s divided into three sections: one part takes place in Acadia National Park in Maine, one in Franklin Park in Boston, and one in the lot next to my house. The project was prompted by an experience I had while filming on a trip with my family in Acadia. As I was driving around, I saw a Nazi flag next to the American flag in someone’s garage, which you can see in the film. And when it happened, I felt dumb, because I had thought I was in a safe space. I felt like I’d let my guard down and I shouldn’t have. Emotionally, we were all a wreck, because they had just killed George Floyd a week before, and again, we were experiencing a global pandemic.
After that happened, I started seeing those same dynamics within Franklin Park, which I go to all the time, and started filming everyday interactions there as well. There, the golf course is right next to where the bocineros, or speaker-heads, hang out with these super loud sound systems. On Saturdays and Sundays, it’s really fun: people hang out with their families, playing dominoes and playing music. But the sound bothers the people at the golf course, and then they call the cops, and the cops come and say you can’t play music here, and the bocineros move. And then they come back, and then they move, and they play this game, a constant back and forth of transgression and assertion. This is a question of how you understand or see the loudness of the music culturally, right? Because yes, it’s an interruption. But it’s also festivity, community, and sharing. And it feels like a bold dynamic that happens especially in public spaces.
The third section was a staged performance for the film that takes inspiration from Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian navigator whose career in balloons and airships took off at the turn of the twentieth century. He is said to have hosted sky-high fundraising dinners in which he sat guests at a table that was about six feet high, so waiters had to climb staircases to reach the tabletop. As part of the performance, I got a table and put some good food on it that I cooked with my family in an earth oven we dug together in the lot. I made sculptures of the decapitated heads of famous statues of colonizers in New England, and we smashed them over the course of dinner. Santos-Dumont was a utopian and futurist thinker; he believed in technology bringing us to new heights. I was drawing a connection to his absurdist strategies of bringing new ideas to the people by meeting in the air, in the realm of his airships; but in my film, we are performing our ideas on the ground, in the realm of colonial histories and contested space.
Sometimes, you hear solutions for structural racism and proposals for coexisting in public space within the United States as if one element is supposed to just turn the table and reset things. It’s not necessarily that I know the answer. I’m just trying to navigate these things as much as everybody else, both in a joyful and frustrating way, and sometimes it’s scary to confront these things.
This issue of Fortunately is about how artists and communities reimagine the conditions and economies of production. Can you speak about that from the perspective of your own practice?
My work is very anchored to my family, and to our house and the place where we live. My wife [Kimberly Forero-Arnías] is an animator, and she also works in our garage studio, and she helps me with everything. So from my wife to my daughter, my mother-in-law, and my mom, it’s like a multi-generational abuela-mother-daughter team. What I’m doing is dedicated to them, but this space is for all of us, and we’re investing in everything together. And it’s extremely practical: I do not have enough money to have a separate studio because what I do is not really sellable. My work is a way that I think, the way that I move through space, and something that I really, really love to do. But I'm not really making money. I'm just glad that I even have enough space for my family and my work within my own community.
So the production of my work is hyperlocal and familial. But through my work, I also try to understand myself and my local spaces in a global context. I feel that if I can understand those things, perhaps my daughter can understand them, and perhaps I can understand my family better too. In my own personal life, we don’t know much about our histories. We only know what my grandmother used to tell us. We don’t own things. There are no photos. So this idea of recreating a possibility of a history that is personal feels like the right thing to do. I go to these points of departure and arrival, these significant sites within global histories of Blackness, and try to find a link between my own Blackness and a larger diasporic consciousness.
My ideas and questions stem from my life but aren’t just related to me: what is Black, what is Black enough, what is not Black enough, what are Black spaces, where do we need Black spaces, and how does all of that intersect with immigration? I’m not from here. I think that’s why I’m trying to just come out and do the most with what I have.
This article appears in the UN/MAKING issue.