Earthen Weapon:
Brick Threats and Promises

Tamara Santibañez

Artist Tamara Santibañez presents an incomplete genealogy of the brick in the radical political imagination, from the "first brick" at Stonewall, to the mysterious pallets of bricks during 2020's George Floyd uprisings, to the "reverse bricklaying" of students at Gaza solidarity encampments on campus. Discussing their own work as an oral historian and sculptor as well as the work of other artists using brick, their talk will offer a series of brick vignettes and considerations from firsthand encounters, archival research, rumors, and gossip. 

Offering the brick as a way of seeing, Santibañez will discuss the paradox of the brick and brick wall, the invitations and limitations of a solo brick versus a brick in formation, and ask: What do you know of bricks? Do you know a brick when you hear it? Can you feel a brick as it's happening?

Tamara Santibañez is an interdisciplinary artist and oral historian based in Brooklyn, New York. 

Their practice employs storytelling, archival research, tattooing, and craft-based sculptural techniques to interrogate the ways in which hostile architectures, borders, and coded languages are re/produced and re/interpreted on the body. They are the author of Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Workand the poetry chapbook Memory Lane.

Thanks to The Laundromat Project’s Create & Connect micro-grant fund that seeds and supports creative projects by cultural practitioners, community builders, organizers, and makers living in our home of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.