Deanna Ledezma, Josh Rios, and Anthony Romero—together known as the Place as Practice Research Collective—are just as concerned with what’s hidden as they are with what’s visible. In their exhibition at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, “The place where the creek goes underground,” the trio make a tribute to sites, histories, archives, and points of connection that are often unnamed, but are deeply felt by those attuned to their presence. As Roberto Bedoya, the cultural affairs manager for the City of Oakland, explained to Romero, “In every city or town . . . there is a creek. In every creek, there is a place where it goes underground. That place may still be accessible, or it may be paved over. It may be a parking lot, or a hospital, or a set of condos. Somewhere in that city or town, there is someone who remembers this place, the place where the creek goes underground.”
Through the lens of kinship, both the exhibition and forthcoming book take on the multilayered pasts and presents that shape the regions the artists and their relatives have called home: South Central Texas, the Texas Hill Country, and Northern Mexico. Their work flows without linearity or rigidity across borders and timelines, connected by shared experiences of shifting landscapes that have been dominated by capitalism, settler colonialism, and nationalism.
Through this collaboration, Ledezma, Rios, and Romero offer texts, photographs, sculptures, and interventions that somehow seem to both collapse and accentuate time. Ancestral knowledge is embedded within documentation of recent ecological degradation. Family histories are presented as collective memoirs. The creek becomes a stand-in for what we lose when these stories are not preserved—still present, but unable to offer its resources. Together, Ledezma, Rios, and Romero discuss the origins of their collective and how a collaborative approach to storytelling can shift the ways we engage with land, natural resources, and one another.
Introduction by Jameson Johnson
BAR: When did the three of you meet? How did the Place as Practice Research Collective form?
Josh Rios: This is a complicated story with an untidy chronology that reflects the realities of long-term collaboration and the places we come from. The three of us first met in Austin and San Marcos, Texas, where we participated in local arts communities.
At the time, we were all attending Texas State University and occasionally were in the same classes. We moved to Chicago in 2009 and 2010 to pursue graduate degrees, and Anthony and I began collaborating on performances while at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017, Anthony and I contributed to the exhibition “Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly,” curated by Risa Puleo. Deanna’s archival research and life-writing practice were ever-present and informative at this time as well. The following year, Anthony and I cofounded Sonic Insurgency Research Group with musician and artist Matt Joynt. In that configuration, we made installations and sound art, coauthored essays, and organized an interview series. In 2019, Anthony, Deanna, and I collaborated on an installation for the exhibition “Re:Working Labor,” curated by Daniel Eisenberg and Ellen Rothenberg. This eventually led to the establishment of our writing group and latest collaboration—the Place as Practice Research Collective.
Place as Practice Research Collective, Inner Tube Vitrine II, 2024. “The place where the creek goes underground,” installation view, on view in the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, through December 14, 2024. Photo by Julia Featheringill. Courtesy of the artists and Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
BAR: I’d love to dig into some of the objects and materials that are present in the exhibition. We see gravel, inner tube, cedar leaves, a corrugated metal garden bed, and the items that you presented within the vitrines include family photos, images of pecan trees, postcards of ranches, deer hooves, etc. You each possess rich individual practices as educators, writers, musicians, and visual artists. How did this configuration of work and materials come together for Radcliffe?
Deanna Ledezma: All three of us have individual and collective experiences studying, working with, and theorizing archives. These archives may be housed in institutions, maintained by individuals or communities, or in the making. The process of archival accumulation and arrangement has worked well as a strategy for collaboration. Instead of insisting on a single way of engaging with materials, this approach encourages viewers to generate their own associations and lines of inquiry. More broadly, it asks what counts as an archive and what creative uses might archives have. For the Radcliffe exhibition, we drew upon objects we have been acquiring about the Texas Hill Country, South Central Texas, and Northern Mexico. Much of the ephemera was purchased from eBay or antique shops. Other objects have a direct or imagined familial provenance. My father and I found the deer antler on our family’s land in Bandera on New Year’s Day. It has no easily legible historical value, but its linkage to place warranted its inclusion in the show. My family dug for fluorite stones in Múzquiz, Coahuila, but having no specimens from that time, the stones in the exhibition are approximations for a fictive archive.
Anthony Romero: I think of archives, labels, vitrines, and other museological technologies as forms which are already imbued with a certain kind of cultural and historical legitimacy. So to take those forms and use them as the means of displaying the material history of our families and lands is an act of historical insistence and existential persistence. There are many stories that could be told to illustrate this point, but, suffice to say, all of our families struggle with a time loop of erasure and dispossession. To recognize the organization of generational knowledge and experience through a self-made archive is one way to break that loop.
Deanna Ledezma, Returning as research: photographs, 2024. Photo courtesy of Place as Practice Research Collective.
Deanna Ledezma, Returning as research: photographs, 2024. Photo courtesy of Place as Practice Research Collective.
BAR: You produced a broadsheet specific to this exhibition that is integrated into the artworks and can be taken away by visitors. Tell us about how the material of the broadsheet functions within the exhibition, as collaged into the wall works, and as a collective practice of writing.
AR: All three of us came to the arts through writing and music. Writing remains an important part of our individual and collective practices. Typically, we look for structures that allow for individual texts to be in chorus with each other, although I think we’d all agree that the genesis of any particular thought or string of thoughts is knotted in our collective study and sociality. We’re always in conversation and we’re always moving ideas between each other. The broadsheet in the exhibition is the first time that we wrote as a singular-voice author. Our hope was to use the text to give viewers more access to the archive we’ve amassed and to articulate our practice of kinship research.
The decision to incorporate the broadsheet into the installation is a concerted way of creating “wallpaper.” The emplacement of the broadsheet in the archive asks the viewer to read the text as a material literally and metaphorically situated in the landscape of the installation.
BAR: As a collective, your work is tied to place, but it’s notable that the three of you are not living in the same region. How has the nature of your collaborative work shifted over time? How do you ground or reorient yourselves to these locales from a distance?
DL: The beginning of my collaborative work on kinship coincided with the writing of my doctoral dissertation on family photography. The process of writing a dissertation in the humanities is often treated as a solitary endeavor. But, as a first-gen college student, the further I progressed in higher education, the more I wished to feel connected to my family and make space for the minoritized experiences traditionally excluded from the field of art history. To counter these omissions in preexisting scholarship, I began interviewing my father, Joe Ledezma, about his memories of being a Mexican immigrant in the Texas Hill Country and his relationship to photography. Early on, I was fortunate to receive invitations to publish creative nonfiction essays with Green Lantern Press in 2016 and Walls Divide Press in 2017, which helped this practice gain momentum. Without those small presses, I think I could have easily said, “There’s not enough time for this type of writing. It’s a digression!” The formation of the Place as Practice Research Collective emerged out of a similar set of shared desires, including devoting parts of our creative and intellectual lives to the people and places we call home. There is a diasporic sensibility to how we relate to these regions of Texas, which is amplified not only by time and distance, but also generational differences and our academic professions. I’d also add our relocations to regions and cities outside of Texas have heightened our awareness of diasporic communities and historical and contemporary conditions of displacement.
JR: We are all from places that share commonalities and are linked together through the shifting landscape as opposed to the rigid boundaries of city limits or county lines. We all have distinct experiences of the hyper-localities we come from. But also share a lot in terms of historical forces and territorial domains. Some of the things that link us are the waterways and ecosystems throughout the region. Other linkages are transhistorical migration patterns, experiences with colonial reverberations, and the power dynamics of settler colonialism. For us, this multi-scaled approach is central.
AR: The only thing that I would add is that the practice of kin-making is also a form of emplacement. What I mean is that when we are together (working, laughing, writing, etc.), we are also making a place for each other. Just being together we are home again.
Place as Practice Research Collective, “The place where the creek goes underground,” installation view, on view in the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, through December 14, 2024. Photo by Julia Featheringill. Courtesy of the artists and Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
BAR: Your work deals directly with the southern border, a region with this artificial political boundary that is marked by a waterway, the Rio Grande. Water holds so much power within your work; I’m curious how you think about the relationship between a body of water like the Rio Grande (a boundary) and the creeks, streams, and aquifers of Texas (a resource).
JR: I think the Rio Grande is such an important geologic and cultural arena, especially in terms of the dramatization of the conflicts and cross-cultural diffractions of the international boundary. But the Guadalupe or Colorado Rivers are also important, if less overtly linked to the violence of US-Mexico relations and the construction of national border logics. Both the Guadalupe and Colorado Rivers flow in similar directions, although for shorter lengths, and connect to the Gulf of Mexico. A strange historical reality is that one of the first maps of the so-called New World is of the Texas coastline. Normative cartography expresses a limited perspective on something like groundwater or the networks of aboveground and underground streams and lakes connecting what appear to be isolated rivers. The way a river appears on a map is similar to the way a national boundary appears. Its configuration feels static and seems rationally true from the “objective” space of the map, but on the ground and taking into account lived experience, the linear story of both borders and rivers branch into more complex shifting patterns that are neither visible nor traceable and that change over time.
AR: I’ve always wondered how the river felt about this—if it consented to be weaponized in contestation over territory, resources, citizenship, cultural legitimacy, and so on. I’ve sat with this thought for a long time and often think how different a story it would be if the river had been asked for consent.
DL: On a quotidian and local scale, I think of how, in the region where I was raised, creeks sometimes vernacularly function as names for neighborhoods or residences. Instead of using a street address, we might refer to a place by its proximity to a creek. Some of these names in the Texas Hill Country, such as Turtle Creek, underscore the ecosystems and animals that have inhabited a creek or the land near it. Noting the water quality and levels of creeks are also ways of marking seasons and the passing of time.
BAR: Kinship and storytelling are themes that run through all aspects of this project. Kinship with the land, ancestors, time, place, and one another is then presented through visual and written storytelling. How do you bring these concepts into your daily lives?
DL: We have talked about the dining table as a central site of intergenerational storytelling. Storytelling, after all, sustains kinship ties, particularly across living and passed generations. The dining table is also where we maintain connections to the Mexican-origin food that we grew up eating with our families. This shared cuisine, in its new and reclaimed iterations, is integral to our everyday lives. As an educator in art history and liberal arts departments, I consider visual and written storytelling to be the very foundation of the subjects I teach. But, rather than universalizing storytelling, I have created courses on Latinx/e art, visual culture, and life writing that attend to meaningful cultural, geographical, and historical specificities.
JR: Daily life is very hard, neoliberal, distracting, exploitative, and so on. It takes so much to sustain life within a social structure that really has little interest in life, whether that is human or greater-than-human. One place I try to bring this sense of close communion with others is the classroom, which poses all kinds of complex realities and problems, especially at a large private art school in an urban context. This has a lot to do with my own intense interest in pedagogical and epistemic justice, as well as taking seriously the knowledge that people accumulate and bring with them, whether it is formalized within the academy or part of lived experience.
BAR: This issue’s theme, Make Believe, is as much about play as it is about world-building and imagining alternative futures. In speaking about knowledge passed down through generations, Roberto Bedoya introduced the term “ancestor intelligence” as part of the exhibition’s opening program. Do you think there is a connection between inherited knowledge and building a more equitable future? How might art be part of this equation?
JR: We had a previous project called Our Future Is a Thing of the Past. For us, the title calls forth the time loops of dispossession, rebellion, and refusal that Mexican American communities exist within. We see similar ideas in the work of Nick Estes, who refuses to pit tradition and progress against each other. We embrace a non-static idea of tradition, which addresses the current moment while valuing the lessons of previous experience. As far as art goes, I am most interested in the creativity people express not only in terms of material arrangements of space and place, but also in how they tell stories and convey information verbally or nonverbally. We all have an interest in what Diana Taylor refers to as the “repertoire,” the embodied and performative activities that make up memory practices.
AR: I loved it when Roberto brought up the real AI—ancestor intelligence. Our work is never about linearity. It’s more about recognizing returns. In this way, it is better to think of a spiral than a straight line. From the front, one sees a spiral as a circle, a loop, but change your position and you’ll see progress within the return. We’ve made some work that dealt with this more directly by engaging with speculative futures and post-colonial science fiction, as Josh referenced, but I think it’s in our current work as well. Knowledge, like time, is not neat and orderly; it’s experiential, and for this reason, what we know and how we know shapes the world and, in turn, our sense of selves.
Thank you to Meg Rotzel and Caitlin Rubin for the research they contributed to this piece.
“The place where the creek goes underground” is on view at Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery of Byerly Hall, 8 Garden Street, Cambridge, through December 14, 2024.
