Daily Routines - Marta Hernandez's exhibition catalogue by Tomas Peters

DAILY ROUTINES Marta Hernรกndez Parraguez

Curated by Joselyne Contreras Cerda

Marta Hernรกndez Parraguez

DAILY ROUTINES Two perspectives

Curated by Joselyne Contreras Cerda

310 NXRd Gallery London

Marta Hernández Parraguez Daily Routines. Two perspectives 310 NXRd Gallery CAL - Goldsmiths, University of London November, 2015 Editorial board: Tomás Peters/Jorge Saavedra Utman Design: Bryce D’gnau

Texts By

Joselyne Contreras Carlos Fonseca Martín Savransky Tomás Peters Fernando Sdrigotti Felipe Lagos Jorge Saavedra Utman Roberta Antonaci Rosario Fernández Dario Lolli

Sharing fragments of life experiences Joselyne Contreras "At 4pm on the street, I am always surprised by the indifference of the people crossing each other's paths. Nobody talks to anyone they don't know, to whom they haven't been introduced; only a catastrophe or some incident on the street can momentarily shatter this isolation" Annette Messager

Daily Routines. Two Perspectives is an art project created by the Chilean artist Marta Hernández. As an inhabitant of New Cross for two years, Marta has walked, smelled and observed the neighbourhood. Wandering throughout the streets, she has seen moods, life rhythms and trajectories of people coming from ‘who knows where’ to this particular spot in southeast London. All foreigners, like she, like the authors that contribute to this catalogue and like me. Considering two common activities done by immigrants in New Cross -studying and working- Marta Hernández conducts an artistic research method to visualize encounters between workers and students in New Cross. To do this research she has selected tools explored in some of her previous works (1): words, lines and photographs. Words recorded in audio capturing daily routines of workers and students of New Cross; lines acting as maps and drawings; and photographs as visual testimonies of people’s life, like postcards of their favourite spots. Marta’s work allows the collaboration of anyone and extends a kind invitation: draw a line of your life in the streets, tell me you story (if you want) and take a picture of something particularly relevant for you while you walk. Now, for the one making this invitation the task is not easy. When you are an immigrant in a country with different language the communication gets complex. Words might become blurry and meaning could get entangled in semantics. But it carries the sincerity of real life told in the closeness of confidence. The lines, on the other hand, are the graphic gesture on the paper drawn with the

weight of a hand shaping trajectories New Cross. Trajectories depicted in snapshots of daily life, giving form to a fragmented view of a shared area. It is in this mixture of aesthetic signs where the art as praxis points out social, political and historical aspects of our being in a fragment of the world. Following Joseph Kosuth, “art is manifested in praxis; it “depicts” while it alters society.” In this case, it does so activating a simple starting gesture: to talk to someone. As I said at the beginning of these words, “Daily Routines. Two Perspectives” is an art project but carries a political resistance. It is a struggle against “the indifference of the people crossing each other’s paths” (Messager, 1972). Daily paths and acts that allow us to think in the words of Goethe: “every fact is already a theory”. Therefore every activation of the point (Kandinsky 19..), every line and every shared fragment of life experiences it is a part, a fragment, a piece of a potential political theory of dailyness. (1) In recent years Marta Hernández has worked with interviews, postcards, photographs and drawings in different works. For instance, she recorded interviews in "National Hero" (2013), asking to different people whom were the Chilean heroes; she proposed photographs as postcards in "Quilicura Project" (2013), where she worked with images of the Quilicura Council's archive in Santiago, Chile; she drew using white pencil on veil in "Panoramic of the Chilean painting" (2012) and graphite on the wall in "Registered" (2011); and also she explored the possibilities of the emulsion in "History after all" (2010). Consequently, one of the main questions in Hernández's works is about the forms of history construction, that it is also presents -taking a different approach- in "Daily Routines.Two perspectives".

The Language of Migrancy Carlos Fonseca

What is the language of migrancy? In a world that relishes absolute transparency, equivalence and homogeneity, the migrant dares to speak in another language. Accented, different, opaque, always at the verge of unintelligibility, the idiolect of the migrant forces the metropolis to reach beyond itself. Language is required to dance alongside its limits in order to reach for that frontier where the very possibility of comprehension is staged out as the utopia of a sincere dialogue. The language of migrancy is then that of politics. What is at stake, every single time the migrant speaks, is the distinction between what belongs inside and what belong outside the city. Every single time a migrant speaks this distinction collapses. That is to say: every single time a migrant speaks a frontier is questioned. This frontier has many names: it is sometimes New Cross, it is sometimes Tijuana, it is sometimes a wall and sometimes a sea. It sometimes even takes the form of a name: Kafka, BolaĂąo, Gombrowicz, Walcott, or Beckett. More often than not, however, it is precisely what happens to language when it leaves behind the warmth of the proper and decides to venture beyond itself: its true place is the nomadic realm of poetry. Kafka, BolaĂąo, Gombrowicz, Walcott, or Beckett: what these names remind us of is the poetic capacity language has of becoming a foreigner to itself. There where language becomes opaque even to itself, wherever language risks it all by pursing its intuitions and passions, the possibility of another form of community is born. One must risk becoming incomprehensible in order to become recognizable.

The Invention of Habits Martín Savransky

There is a habitual saying that habits are intrinsically conservative. ‘Habits die hard’, the saying goes. I’ve always wondered, rather, whether it was the saying that was conservative. That a habit, a routine, be conservative or not seems to me to depend entirely on the nature of the habit in question. And for its love of a still past, conservatism never really got along with history. For history –itself a form of metaphysical habit?– is nothing but the rhythm of change, of invention, of the new. So poor is its relation to history that the phrase ‘Habits die hard’ ignores that habits are always connected, etymologically and otherwise, to habitats, to environments in relation to which they get forged and which they in turn contribute to forging. Because history is often smarter than those who would like it to stop, it is no coincidence that habit and routine show some kind of family resemblance. Routine too, frowned upon for its infra-ordinariness, for its daily repetitiveness, has a migrant history, a history of changing habitats, of changing habits– the creative, moving habits of carving new routes, of delineating new habitats. Born of the invention of habits, of the new routes that routines create, words and names secrete a certain wisdom. If one is in the habit of reading closely, that is. If one can slow down, and pay attention. New Cross, I am told, is a name with its own secret wisdom, coming to designate a triangular habitat formed through the creative routines of people that carved their moving histories into railways and roads that today mark its contours. New Cross, the cross of the new,

of novelty, of novel ideas, lives, habits and routines. Following this wisdom of words, then, one can begin to savour the radical history that characterises this habitat, from the imprisonment of the parish priest of St. James Hatcham for radical teachings in 1870s, the Battle of Lewisham between the National Front and anti-Fascist groups in 1977, to the radically new ideas and practices brewing today on its corners, in its classrooms, in its pubs, by people and things that are always in movement, always re-creating their habits as they routinely transform, and are transformed by, their habitat.

Habits die hard. Yes, thank god. They are the force of life.

Psychogeography in New Cross Tomás Peters

wan·der /wóndǝr / v. 1 intr. Go from place to place aimlessly. 2 intr. a wind about; diverge; meander. b stray from a path, etc. 3 intr. talk or think incoherently. wan’der·er n. wan’ der·ing n. (esp. in pl.). 1 walk, roam, rove, range, stray, ramble, stroll. 2 a snake, zigzag. 3 digress, turn, stray, drift, depart, go off on a tangent. wan·der /wan’ der·ing / New · Cross / London

v. 1 intr. Daily Routines 2 intr. I wander the streets of New Cross witnessing the eternal features of urban life. I’m going from place to place aimlessly, in zigzags, talking, gazing and thinking incoherently. It’s New Cross; at home. 3 intr. Bryce House [turn right], John Williams Close [turn right], Hunsdon Rd [turn left. I see Hatcham Temple Grove Primary School], Monson Rd. [Straight], Brian Street, Bus Stop. All Saints Church, Payless, £1 – 1664, 172, 453, 53, 21, New Cross Road, Lycamobile, Best Kebab, Chinese food to take away, Shop to Let, Aldi. [I think it’s better to come back to that another time]: Towards the south. Hair and Beauty Salon, The Five Bells, Parker Estates, Londis, £6 Casillero del Diablo, Sainsbury’s, Gateway Chicken, The Rose Inn, New Cross House, The Venue, Lewisham, Ladbrokes, This bus will wait a short time for a change of drivers to take place. [Let’s go off on a tangent]. Monson Road, Music Room London, Cold Blow Lane, Bridgehouse Meadows, SE14 5XG, Millwall. 4 intr. Two Perspectives. It means to miss the mark or to stray from a path.

New Cross Fernando Sdrigotti

“Writing is always solipsistic” I, sometime, somewhere I remember New Cross in 2004; jumping on the train at Whitechapel; the characterless journey that would follow. And not much more. I don’t remember New Cross. I was 27 back in 2004 — a mature student granted an unconditional offer to study History of Art in a college that for several weeks I only registered as a location in space, south of the Thames. “Where do you study?” “I study somewhere in New Cross.” I couldn’t care less about names, to be fair. But the offer was unconditional and I wanted to study, anything. Because I thought that studying anything would get me out of the cycle of shit jobs in which I was stuck. And one of my favourite fiction authors had mentioned History of Art in a dust cover (1). So simple were my decisions. And for such simple endeavours any university would have done (2). New Cross will always smell of grilled meat to me. Not because this is the way New Cross — which I don’t remember — or my classmates (3) actually smelled but because it will always smell of the thirty-six hours of restaurant work I would put over three days so that I could dedicate the other four days of the week to studying for a rather useless degree (4). My life couldn’t have been more different from the rest of the people in my classroom, most of them untainted by work and more concerned with the next SU party than with marks, fees, the future, or anything close to

an idea. Not to say that they were doing anything wrong, being the young careless idiots they were, but to stress how easy it is to be alienated from those around you. I was an alien in my classroom as much as my college was an aberration in New Cross; Goldsmiths, a hub of intellectual life — and all the privileges this type of life requires — was and is located in the centre of a largely deprived area. The figure of Asterix’s village, surrounded by Roman garrisons on one side and the ocean on the other comes to mind. Only that resistance in the case of Goldsmiths takes on a patina of social ‘editing’. As it should be expected I don’t remember any kind of dialogue between this hub and New Cross or its people, any kind of connection between Goldsmiths and its neighbourhood. The only time I saw a student interact with a local was in a pub just across campus, during a football game (Millwall against some other shitty team); and the interaction was limited to the local man “performatively criticising” the student’s face with a fist after the student knocked a pint on this gentleman’s coat. I could have imagined this; why would I remember it otherwise? I will always wonder if the people of New Cross registered the differences among us. Or if they just saw us as a homogenous and coherent threat, a horde of young and not so young people, carrying out incomprehensible rituals, behind the closed doors of our ivory towers (2). I wonder if they tend to forget us, just as we forget them5 Has New Cross been gentrified yet? Has it followed the same road to Organicdom as Hackney, Brixton, and so many other once deprived areas of London? Not long ago I returned to New Cross to find that

local infamous shithole The Hobgoblin had been replaced by what by all means looked like a gastropub. The Marquis of Granby — the place of the fight I wrote about above — seemed to be holding on there, in its corner just opposite campus. Other areas seemed to have been ‘renovated’, stolen from amnesiac oblivion, granted some form of visibility(6). Perhaps this is the destiny of every corner of London: to become an anonymous space, a space extramuros from our imaginary castles (be these universities, banks, or craft beer cafés), a menacing space that exists somewhere in limbo. A space we can forget, until it is our time to be erased out of others’ histories.

(1) Belén Gaché, in the dust cover of Luna India. (2) A couple of months before New Cross I had been snubbed by an expedite scholar in a dark and musty office somewhere in Bloomsbury — Bloomsbury, whatever the college it was, didn’t think much of me. I got disqualified from the race for a BA over some minor disagreement about John Willian Waterhouse and the pre-Raphaelites, whom I called “these blokes painting mythical stuff whom I liked when I was reading the Art Book”. My first experience of academia in the UK was a three-minute-long interview with a grey man who refused to raise his eyes from the paper he was staring at — he might have been checking out The Racing Post for all I know. Not that the Art Book is any good, in all fairness, even if it still holds tenure of office next to my toilet seat. (3) My classmates mainly smelled of hormonal turmoil and a bad diet. Some smelled

better and with these I have kept a friendship after graduation. (4) The neoliberalisation of everyday life, particularly as experienced today after two consecutive Conservative governments, dictates that only business or management degrees have any value. Unless one comes from a wealthy family, in which case History of Art might serve as a perfect entry point to a myriad careers in this or that sector. (5) Of course these ivory towers don’t exist; if they ever existed this is no longer the case. Academia, as anyone trying to get in the sector would agree is — since being taken over by a junta of managers, bureaucrats, and elbow-patch-clad psychopaths with doctoral degrees — a precarised degree-selling factory. (6) A request for comment from a local person received no response because I didn’t ask any local person: New Cross continues to be impenetrable to me. Particularly now that I no longer smell of grilled meat.

Who do you meet in there? Felipe Lagos

As a migrant student in London, my first impressions contrasted the stateliness of the building in Central London, on the one hand, and the topological plainness of the city’s landscape. I would soon realise that the few hills in Southern London are perfect spots when London’s contemplation is needed or wished. Telegraph Hill and so-called Nunhead’s reservoir became thus my favourite neighbour sites, either to meet groups of friends or to be on my own. To use and enjoy parks or green places as the English people do is not easy; there is a process to get used to. So, a normal spring or summer day in College was normally challenged by the need, yes need, to go to the hill, when a little sunshine was peeping out from above. Lovely, isn’t it? However, it soon became evident that these places are as segregated as the city itself. The Nunhead’s reservoir, perhaps because it is a non-public and therefore illegal-to-come in place, is always full of hipsters, students and well-off people. Telegraph Hill, in contrast, is more balanced in terms of representing the actual inhabitants of the area; nonetheless, you can also see the segregation when you cross the road from the Upper to the Lower Hill. Why is this so? Is it that people from different backgrounds use the public space differently? How do you use your parks, squares, hills and green areas? Who do you meet in there?

Bodies coming from the dark Jorge Saavedra Utman

7:30 pm I secretly love her and secretly love him. Walking among the bushes, trees, the fog and the cold I began to feel attached to those bodies from the first weeks I arrived to this city. Well, to be honest I did not arrive to a city because â&#x20AC;&#x201C;and to be fair- when you arrive to a city you never arrive to a city, as simple as that. Not simple? It is the same thing that happens when you arrive to a country. Whatever it happens, you never arrive to a country. Even when the passport stamp of the Border Agency says so, you never arrive to a country; you arrive to places that are an experience of life. And that experience of life is mostly a neighbourhood. I arrived to New Cross covered with a scarf and a coat and everything looked grey, brown and suddenly red. The sky, houses and buses painted the canvas of my steps discovering accents, colours, dresses and rhythms challenging my Victorian idea of London. Anyway, everything looked different and fascinating but I began to miss bread â&#x20AC;&#x201C;yes, certain type of bread not available around here- calling friends to stop by or playing cards with my mom. So moved by nostalgia, one evening of November I walked to buy some things to wash out nostalgia with a tasty dinner with me, myself and I. So I went to the supermarket and to save time I took a shortcut. I really was not sure of my route but I walked forward. It was almost entirely dark but the thin yellowness of the streetlights warned

me about some presence. Damn! There were bodies coming to me all along the way. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Hey youâ&#x20AC;? said one of them with its tail raised and winding its body between my legs. Crossed by the surprise and misbelieve, I kneeled down to caress it when I noticed that another one was also joining the meeting. After touch them and caress them for a long time I said goodbye, worried that some human considered my behaviours as inappropriate. Some seconds after I spotted other bodies in the route. Some of them were friendly and nodded their heads; others just gave me a cold stare while enjoying the warmth of a living room...a few lied on the porch watching the wheels. Just like in my hometown, just like in every single place I have lived. From that day on, those two blocks through Hatcham Park Road had become a passage to a place where I have always lived in. Now that I am more used to humans, my feline mates still come out to say hello, remembering me â&#x20AC;&#x201C;and my partner- that they will always be there, wherever I may roam.

Pieces of London Roberta Antonaci

My routine in and out New Cross Gate started with a simple deal: English lessons in exchange for painting lessons. Marta had just arrived from Chile to live in the UK. I knew her through her partner Tomas; she needed to improve her level of English and had so many things to teach me. I felt so excited to become her friend. The first time I went to her house, Marta came to pick me up from the tube and we took this funny picture â&#x20AC;&#x201C; our reflection in a mirror that was dumped in front of a house. At the beginning, all was new to me in New Cross Gate. I had to heavily rely on my phone to find my way to her house and got lost a few times. Then, every time I did the same path over and over again, I discovered something new such as a silver birch with fluttering leaves on a corner or a bush with pale pink roses in front of a house. One of the first things I noticed was a general feeling of quietness and peace. London is not an easy city to live in and you can feel a sense of alienation simply because there are too many people around you. Sometimes, when you are too close to others, you have not even the physical space to look outside yourself. While walking in those quiet streets on a lazy Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon, I took the time to be more conscious of what was happening out there and enjoyed framing the colours and beauty of the place in a few pictures. Simple things made me feel happy clicking with memories from the past or plans for the future; children playing with a ball in a solitary street, cats idly sleeping in a pot. The months passed and the blurry vision became clearer and

clearer. A wealth of details emerged. If at the beginning I had to orient myself with the names of the streets and big buildings, by the end I had my automatic pilot and could enjoy the richness of the weekly journey focussing on silly things like seeing the sunlight through the Autumnal red leaves. I never rang the bell of Martaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house. I preferred calling her to see her face popping out from the window and her hands waving. To me it was a way to create a contact before meeting each other. In the last days, it was not necessary to call her anymore. Marta or Tomas magically appeared at the window every time I was walking towards their house. The painting/English lesson at the end was much more than that. Every time we started with a summary of our week and ended by sharing laughs and deep thoughts. In two months, Marta and Tomas will return to Chile. I am not sure I will come back to New Cross Gate after that and the idea makes me feel sad. How many times do we walk along streets, live in places and create our routine and a general meaning around a specific part of the cityâ&#x20AC;Śand then suddenlyâ&#x20AC;Śwe move on and possibly never come back? The good thing is that I will always bring with me the paintings, the pictures and the invisible infinite secret happiness that I found in a corner of London! I like thinking Marta will take a piece of me with her in Chile too.

Migrant/not migrant Rosario Fernández

Hello, sorry to bother you, we are doing an art project on migrant students, are you a local or migrant student? Would you like to participate?’ ‘I am not a migrant, I am an international student. I was surprised when an Asian girl told me that she was not a migrant but an international student. I felt embarrassed and guilty of naming her migrant and asked for her forgiveness for taking her time and left. Emotions emerged, I was mad at myself for labeling a girl that did not feel or experienced ‘being’ a ‘migrant’, or who had a (colonial) history with ‘migration’ that she did not want to be tangled with. I also felt upset, mostly because I do feel a migrant, even though I am also an international student. What made me, and not her, recognize myself as a migrant? I felt a migrant when I arrived to the UK, the minute people didn’t see me as Chilean or Latin American, or could not pronounce my name, and had trouble trying to figure out my ‘origin’. ‘British land’, my body and the body-politics merged, tensioning my own identity. My white skin is not pale, is not as white as ‘British skin’, but is not dark enough. My eyes are dark, but not dark enough. My hair is dark, but not dark enough. I became an enigma that rapidly could be catalogued as a migrant, but which ‘kind of migrant’ was not always clear. I became part of the ‘British gaze’, glances made me feel uncomfortable, I would be exoticised and dismissed within a second’s time. But my recognition as a migrant didn’t (only) emerge from the ‘British gaze’, but through my political engagement with migrant communities. I felt migrant because I was part of a group that was

treated as a non-national, and who wished to resist class, racial and ethnic stereotypes. But by identifying myself as a migrant I was both making evident class differences between regular migrants, refugees and ‘international citizens’, and reinforcing these distinctions. I felt the need to challenge the Asian girl, but how can one do such a political endeavor without using and reproducing imperial and postcolonial labels? What is clear is that political struggles and forms of cultural survival are emotionally lived through everyday practices in complex and problematic manners. They are marked by ‘original scenes’ of empire, coloniality and economic intervention, and performed today using different spatial and discursive strategies to survive, tension and position ourselves within social (dis)order, positionality that can change according to our needs. What is also clear to me is that my trajectory is an ongoing challenge, a challenge that has made me see the worst and the best in me and others, but a challenge that I wish to engage with. Not like many other migrants, I have a choice, I can go back ‘home’ and everything will be fine. However, I desire to feel –here or there- uncomfortable with an experience of my own lived otherness, an experience of ethical awareness in a society that divides the human condition between locals, migrants, refugees and internationals.

Route out Route in Dario Lolli

7:46am, I awake by a kiss. I open my eyes but she’s already left the room. A soft light gets in from the shutters. I make my way to the toilet. An unexpected drop of rain makes me shudder: it’s the leak above dripping again. I find her in the kitchen. We share breakfast while thoughts of work start hunting our day. She’s off and I take my shower. Choose a book for my bag, unplug the phone, put my boots on. When I am out, I see a rubbish bin swallowing a white-haired man as he tries to grasp something from its metallic jaws. London pepenadora, you smile in the face of smart promises. I wonder where I live while I see the bus approaching. I need to run and I jump in as the door is closing. I’ve no breath but I’m in. I try to ignore the ache on my back as I move on the upper deck. I climb the stairs of the tower of Babel. Find a seat at the crossroad of three unknown idioms while the bus heads towards the heart of town. I look through the window. We cross a grey undergrowth of shadows under a forest of synthetic tower-trees. In a billboard, the head of one of them rises in the sky from a sea of clouds, the financial Olympus of today’s gods. In the mortal streets, fundraisers smile and chat breaking the flow of people. Forgotten hairs of the great Bard, they perform for unwilling audiences the challenging play of their affective labour. As I get out, I smell a mix of smoke, banks, superstores and fast food chains. I try to hold my breath. I see the library after a few crowds of people and pigeons. When I’m in, I sit down and turn on the machine. I start to concentrate on my thesis. The flow of tentative writing merges with the vortex of emails,

databases and newsfeeds. I drown into their textual Maelstrom. I resurface just in time for lunch. I gather a few colleagues from stacks of worn books. We stand in front of the Hare Krishna’ stall. Some free and warm food, then a single espresso. No sugar. And a solitary cigarette for my long day. Get back to writing. Strangely I don’t feel drowsy. I feel the pressure of my next deadline. I see the clock; she’s clearly off from work now. I will stay another hour, maybe two. I finally leave at 7pm. A chilly way to the bus stop and I feel suddenly tired. Not sure if I want to read during the ride. I decide to close my eyes and it’s Babel again. When I reopen them, shining little screens have multiplied inside. Outside the city-screen sparks with unnecessary brightness. Only when I get off it’s quiet. I buy fruit from the Turkish shop. As I walk home, I give a glance at the milky surface of the starless sky. I search for the little window of the cow-cat, but there’s no one there tonight. At the entrance, I shake my hand with Benjamin, he’s just back from Nigeria. I’m hungry now. I move up to my door. There’s a homey kiss awaiting me. It’s time to cook, chat, eat, wash up. I feel a bit better now. She starts knitting a cute puppet in the bed. I decide to join her and read a book on her side. I smile as I see her falling asleep with the needles still in her hands. I guess it’s time to turn the light off. I put away needles and book, and I pay a last visit to the toilet. What a relief! the leak above has stopped dripping. At least, until another day.

NOTES ON THE AUTHORS Roberta Antonaci MSc of Economic Development and International Co-operation at the University of Tor Vergata, Rome. She is an environmental activist and works in London. Joselyne Contreras Curator. PhD student in Curatorial/Knowledge at Goldsmiths, University of London. She lives and works in London. Rosario Fernández PhD © in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She currently lives in London. Carlos Fonseca PhD in Latin American Literature at the University of Princeton. He currently teaches at the University of Cambridge and lives in London. Marta Hernández Visual Artist. M.A in Art Theory at the Universidad de Chile. She lives and works in Santiago, Chile. Felipe Lagos PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He currently works and lives in Santiago, Chile. Dario Lolli PhD © in Japanese Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He has studied in Italy, France and Japan. He currently teaches at Birkbeck and lives in London. Tomás Peters PhD in Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He currently works at the Universidad de Chile and lives in Santiago, Chile. Jorge Saavedra PhD © in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. He currently teaches at Goldsmiths College and lives in London. Martin Savransky PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He currently teaches at Goldsmiths College and lives in London. Fernando Sdrigotti PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the editor-in-Chief of Minor Literature[s], and a contributing editor at Numéro Cinq and 3AM Magazine. He lives and works in London.