Brigitte Santana

“Perhaps those of us who are interested in seeing more robust cultural critique need to be more specific about where the intervention might most productively take place. It is not only about shifting the focus of projects so that they feature marginalized communities more prominently; it is about ripping apart and rebuilding the machinery of the archive and database so that it does not reproduce the logic that got us here in the first place.”

— Miriam Posner, “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities”

My project started with mangos.

“Those are mangos,” my Museum Interpretation classmate said, pointing to the large painting in front of us with the label covered.

“No, they’re not,” I said reflexively. “Consider where we are.”

We were in the Modern and Contemporary Gallery at the RISD Museum and it turned out we were standing in front of Wifredo Lam’s The Eternal Presence.

The memory of gripping peeled mangos with my tiny hands, feeling the juice running between my fingers and the tiny strands of fiber in my teeth, is one of my oldest. Long before I ever knew what fine art or a museum was, I ate mangos. Yet, encountering a motif from my past in a place like the RISD Museum did not make sense–or shall I say, being Latina did not prevent me from experiencing implicit bias toward an artwork by a Latin American painter.

Shortly after this experience, I was inspired by an internship description at the Smithsonian Latino Center that proposed identifying and tagging objects within their collections that were made by Latinxs. This succession of experiences made me think about performing a case study on the RISD Museum site, using publically-available metadata and interviews with staff to explore ways that metadata could be optimized to make objects of Latinx or Latin American provenance more accessible. (Note: I selected the RISD Museum due to proximity and relative access, since I am taking a class there this semester).

Continue reading “Exploring the Activist Possibilities of Expanded Metadata”

Usually, I use social media to project what I perceive to be a sunnier version of my existence. My existence is of course informed by my lived experience with regard to race, gender, and class. I am a light-skinned Mexican-American female graduate student who grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles. In many ways, I have been privileged and continue to be relatively privileged, if not financially then through the accumulation of cultural capital. This is an undeniable part of my story.

Another part of my story is the pervasive mental illness, substance abuse, and legacy of trauma in my family, reflective of generations of poverty and oppression. My parents’ upbringing was very different than mine. In trying to circumvent the circumstances they were born into, my parents consciously and deliberately modeled the choices they saw their college classmates making. Watching my parents observe what middle class people did (drive old Volvos, go camping, watch foreign movies), I learned how to adapt to to new systems of social values.

Recently, I had been thinking about class and gender performativity on social networking. I knew that I spent more time than I would like to think trying to post reasonably and responsibly: moderately, with infrequent selfies and a sort of overall wry tone. I attributed this as both an adherence to the middle-class value of simulating modesty by not drawing attention to one’s self and one born out of my experience as a woman, not wanting to burden people. I was interested in observing how middle class conventions or habits translate between digital and non-digital contexts and seeing what happened if I distorted my own Internet persona.

I decided to use Snapchat and Instagram to disrupt the narrative of my Instagram. My plan was to take selfies using some of the flashier Snapchat filters, like the flower crown or the dog, and then post these photos on Instagram over the course of a day or a week. I wanted to both subvert class expectations and reclaim these filters, sometimes pejoratively referred to as “hoe filters.” I was interested in seeing what, if any, reaction it generated, but even more to reveal the distortion that already existed in my Internet persona. It’s not like I never posted selfies, but they were edited to give the impression of minimal distortion.

Continue reading “Saving Face: Distorting my Internet Performance of Gender and Class”