Project Space Residency

C. Diaz (TX),

September 21 – October 19, 2027

Artist Statement

My work explores the intersection between celluloid, audiovisual archives, poetry, and the natural world. I’m especially interested in understanding and re-imagining ancestral desire and its ties to my native landscape in the borderlands of South Texas. In 2017, I embarked on an experimental documentary/fiction hybrid film project titled Puras Ilusiones. Set and documented across the Rio Grande Delta region in South Texas–where the river bends truth–environmental and economic pressures lead to collective action. The film interweaves stories about land, bravery, and mysticism passed down through family members. Puras Ilusiones confronts past and present environmental violence and cultural erasure in the region; excavating lost dreams and buried knowledge to activate an attunement to self and the agency to create new worlds.

Bio

C. Díaz (b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary artist, memory worker, and community organizer currently living and working in the Rio Grande Delta region in South Texas. They are the co-founder of ENTRE, an artist-run community film center and regional archive located in Harlingen, Texas, where they hold roles as facilitator, programmer, and archivist. They have been an Assembling Voices Fellow at Columbia’s INCITE program, an Interchange Artist Grant Fellow, awarded the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Grant, and an Artist in Residence at the Echo Park Film Center.

Project Space Residencies are supported by The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, The Joy of Giving Something Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Monroe County, NY. Photography-based artists participating in the program receive support from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.