Magda Parasidis

Text, urban landscapes, and out of focus images show up regularly in my work as the aesthetic vocabulary I employ to explore themes of urban poverty, the home and memory. The language-based work, rooted in critique, considers the connections between the personal, the political and the aesthetic, while subverting the systems of power that make some lives visible and others not. In the conceptual project, Ghosts in Sunlight, I investigate the intersection of economic and racial justice with poor people’s rights, in the feminist perspective. Reimagining the urban ghetto I have known as home as a space of poetic revelation, the housing projects are transformed from structures of oppression into sites of resistance. With a practice anchored in photography, I make visible the subtle and overt exclusionary violations inherent in the lives of the urban poor as narratives of public concern. The aesthetics of containment and surveillance, and the meditative visual space, invite the viewer to contemplate their emotional responses to race, class and difference, in the service of a renewed critical consciousness.

My work is concerned with how the aesthetics of place contains within itself both systemic exclusionary practices that keep the subaltern on the margins, and opportunities for imagining practices of living otherwise. My aspiration as an artist is to mine my specificity as a once-poor, immigrant, urban American to study the politics of poverty through visual counternarratives attentive to the long-othered humanity of the marginalized. I’m interested in chronicling the emotional legacies and experiments in living of those at the convergence of exclusion, mothering in poverty and labor justice. I’ve begun to use my visual idiom to explore different lineages of possibility and opposition in the pursuit of a new way of being, especially within women’s radical practices; and to articulate how these refusals and ruptures cohere in practices of love and care. I’m asking how the creativity of the subjugated creates utopic spaces and underground networks of mutuality and autonomy - and what the production of this knowledge of the dispossessed has to teach us about alternative modes of living and being together. The hope of my project rests in imagining that visual culture could encourage the awakening of a political sensibility driven by a love ethic of collectivity and compassion.