Perto de Lá <> Close to There, 2019/2020

In 2019 Comfort Station was awarded a $50,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to continue a project I started in 2015 between Salvador, Brazil and Chicago. The foundation's International Connections Fund allowed us to carry out a two-way exchange between artistic communities in Chicago and Salvador, Brazil in 2019 and 2020, in a project called Perto de Lá <> Close To There. We partnered with Projeto Ativa and Harmonipan to bring together a multi-disciplinary group of artists to develop collaborative work, compare models of arts-organizing, and create discourse around Latinx and Black identity in our respective cities.

The project was organized and curated by myself, Lanussi Pasquali of Projeto Ativa and Juci Reis of Harmonipan. This is an extension of the edition of Perto de Lá that I founded and produced in 2015 in collaboration with Lanussi Pasquali and João Pereira.

The first phase of this project brought 12 artists from Salvador to Chicago in August of 2019. In turn, we brought 12 Chicago based artists from Chicago to Salvador.