Emilio Rojas: m(O)thers
The ongoing series of video portraits, “m(Other)s,” references the 19th-century “hidden mother” photographs. The Victorian genre of photography captured infants sitting on their mothers’ laps, who were unceremoniously covered with blankets—designating them as apparatuses to prop up the children. Long exposure times for early photography required the children to sit still, often with failed results and slightly blurred images. The resulting photographs featured ghostly children perched atop uncanny hidden figures. These video portraits cite this early form of photography while reimagining it with Latinx immigrant and undocumented mothers and their children, derrogatorily referred to as “anchor babies.” A controversial term used in xenophobic rhetoric to refer to a child born to a non-citizen mother in a country that has birthright citizenship.
In each site the series is realized, Rojas films and compensates local immigrant and undocumented mothers made invisible underneath a star-spangled banner (with more than 50 stars), holding their children. The mothers’ narratives—anonymized and in their mother tongue of Spanish—share their stories of sacrifice and resilience, but also illuminate their maternal labor rendered invisible, or “othered,” by immigration legislation and xenophobia.
All images courtesy the artist.
About the Artist
Emilio Rojas (Mexico City, 1988) is a multidisciplinary Mexican artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. As a queer, Latinx immigrant with Indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments.
His work has been exhibited in exhibitions and festivals in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Colombia, and Australia, as well as institutions such as The Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual Museum and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Surrey Art Gallery, The DePaul Art Museum, SECCA, the Syracuse University Museum of Art, The Johnson Museum of Art, The Park Avenue Armory, and the Botin Foundation.He holds an M.F.A. in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.F.A. in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada.
From 2019-2022 Rojas was a Visiting Artist in Residency in the Theater and Performance Department at Bard College in New York. He has taught in the M.F.A. programs at Parsons the New School and the low-res M.F.A. programs at PNCA in Portland, Oregon, and University of the Arts, in Philadelphia. From Fall 2022 to the Fall of 2024 he was a full-time visiting critic at Cornell University in the School of Art, Architecture and Planning.
