Auto-Refill Portrait continues the line of inquiry from EE.UU., an investigation into how identity—specifically Latinx identity—is pictured, consumed, and circulated.
I searched: What does Latinx look like?
Food came up. Gang members. Climate charts. Stock images and clichés.
Sourced from those searches, I assembled an archive and printed the images onto capsules—fish oil pills, the kind you’re told to take for your health. I wanted to see what it would mean to take those images. To ingest the stereotypes, the patterns of representation. What happens when the digital archive enters the body? Can the image be metabolized? Will it nourish? Will it pass through the blood-brain barrier, or stay trapped in the gut?
The project speculates through absurdity and intimacy. It asks what happens when cultural identity is “unthoughtfully” prescribed—swallowed whole, repeated without question. An accompanying essay, Take Two: Prescribing Latinx and Medicine as Aesthetic Form, was developed in parallel for Culture Dynamics special issue: Latinx Studies, Variations and Velocities.
I searched: What does Latinx look like?
Food came up. Gang members. Climate charts. Stock images and clichés.
Sourced from those searches, I assembled an archive and printed the images onto capsules—fish oil pills, the kind you’re told to take for your health. I wanted to see what it would mean to take those images. To ingest the stereotypes, the patterns of representation. What happens when the digital archive enters the body? Can the image be metabolized? Will it nourish? Will it pass through the blood-brain barrier, or stay trapped in the gut?
The project speculates through absurdity and intimacy. It asks what happens when cultural identity is “unthoughtfully” prescribed—swallowed whole, repeated without question. An accompanying essay, Take Two: Prescribing Latinx and Medicine as Aesthetic Form, was developed in parallel for Culture Dynamics special issue: Latinx Studies, Variations and Velocities.
Auto-Refill Portrait
