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Jorge Antonio Palacios

Jorge Antonio Palacios is an artist from Yanawana/San Antonio, Texas with roots in Central Mexico. Trained as a glassblower and anthropologist, they make and theorize between the borderlands of South Texas and Tenochtitlan/Mexico City, contemplating technology, craft, and speculative utopias. They hold a BFA in glass from Rhode Island School of Design, a BS in astrophysics from Brown University, and an MA in social sciences from University of Chicago. They have participated in various residencies and exhibitions internationally in the U.S. and Mexico, and they plan to continue PhD work in the Fall as an anthropologist, looking at SpaceX’s influence and effects in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

In my artistic practice, I use foraging, digital media, writing, and installation as methodologies to investigate relationships between land, technology, displacement, and decolonization. I am interested in unconventional forms of speculative science fiction and experimental new media to find what can be learned in the ambiguity of worldbuilding practices. This includes seeing how Indigenous futurity, traditional craft, and land rematriation subvert systems of neoliberalism and technofascism. Lately these projects involve experimenting with craft methods and invasive plants, conducting ethnography with borderlands communities, and gathering people together through outdoor sculpture and video projection. These experiences are then metabolized into a manifesto of speculative fiction, gesturing towards alternative ways of being with each other, technology, and the world.