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Hello! Welcome. My name is Caro Campos (pronunciation)

 

I am currently based in Philadelphia, PA, where I recently began work as Research Assistant to the Director, Dr. Paul Farber, at Monument Lab. Previously, I lived in Curitiba, Brasil, where I researched social housing, land use policy, and constitutional rights to the city at the Ministério Público do Estado do Paraná. Before then, I was a Community Advocate at Legal Aid Justice Center and a Freeman Artist-in-Residence at Visible Records Gallery & Studio in Charlottesville, Virginia.  

 

I moved to Charlottesville in 2018, where I attended the University of Virginia, graduating in 2022 with Highest Distinction in Political & Social Thought and a minor in Urban & Environmental Planning.​​

 

Outside of work, I sing, bike, weight-lift, box, cook, and go on long walks. My favorite album currently is the 1994 Los Tres Caballeros self-titled release, and I recently finished reading Gecekondu Conversations: Archive, Memory, Imagery, Space, Architecture edited by Yaşar Adnan Adnalı, founder of Postane in Istanbul.​

 

This website includes collages and some writing, updated every few months. ​​My email is caromrcampos@gmail.com, and you can connect with me on LinkedIn as well: linkedin.com/in/caro-campos/​​​​​

I use she/her pronouns.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
August 2024-Present

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Freeman Artist Residency 2022-2023

In Heirloom, Caro Campos utilizes collage and interdisciplinary creative traditions to reflect on archival absences, mythology, nationhood, and artifactual assemblage.

 

Heirloom emerges from ideas of heir/inheritance, to loom as a verb, and the loom as a tool of weaving. What forms, narratives, and images are generated in reckoning with the absences inherent in documented and archived histories? What do we inherit from past generations, and what will we choose to take into the future?

 

Heirloom-as-art-object asks the viewer to approach these works as containers of non-linear history, intergenerational collective memory, and as material prologues for future generations. More below.

Heirloom is a space to consider what, who, and where will be our keepsakes. In my creative practice, collage is about relationships of memory, landscape, time, and the physicality of material. Using National Geographic magazines, medical textbooks, case law books, and US history books, collage highlights moments of fracture, material border formations, shadows, rupture, and surrealism. Hauntings in our landscapes and formal archives invite me to tear and rip into my source material as an archival practice.  I’m interested in how institutions of medicine, athletics, and law mediate our intimacies with each other and manufacture our understanding of how to build a more liberatory future.

 

I draw from mundane and quotidian relational acts—weight-lifting, reading, foraging, looking, touching, hearing—that invite me toward an alternative way of relating to memory in my body. How can mixed-methods, woven possibilities of archival practice, such as collage, guide me to more honest relationships within myself, my past, and my future? How can collage be a method of social practice – a surrealist, iterative tool that is as much about presence (creating new realities) as it is about absence (undoing oppressive systems). Collage illuminates these concerns in acknowledging our shatteredness and grief as individuals and as a society. Can we utilize creative archival practice to more fully and honestly embody our imaginations of what is possible, instead of what is merely understood as logistical and practical? 

 

The Freeman Artist Residency (FAR) invited me into twelve months of studio time in order to land safely into my post-graduate exhaust. The studio allowed me space to re-settle into my body and release the hold of linear, academic, and logical methods into a trust for play and tactile making. Embracing intuitive artistic practices—letting the body be a guide for making—I released trust into tactile approaches to knowledge production. Leaning into new methodologies of creative process allowed my subconscious to leak into my work, illuminating my political messages in more nuanced material forms. After Audre Lorde’s erotics, the methods I learned in this residency took me to a space of  transformation that I did not know previously possible.

 

I am inspired by and in conversation with works by Saidiya Hartman, Justine Kurland, Katrien de Blauwer, Jackie Sumell, Tay Butler, Gal Costa, J Dilla, 9th Wonder, NourbeSe Philip, my paternal grandmother, my great aunt (a Catholic nun), and my intergenerational movement family here in Charlottesville.

The Freeman Artist Residency is a one-year artist residency at Visible Records Studio in Charlottesville, Virginia funded by the University of Virginia Department of Art. FAR residents are supported by Associate Professor of Art, Dr. Neal Rock. The residency provides studio space, a $1500 materials stipend, and mentorship from local and international visiting artists. During the year, there are two gallery shows and two open studio opportunities. In the residency, I hosted numerous community workshops, a movie screening and discussion of the documentary Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years, and collage-making lessons.

2018-2022

The collages below were made during my undergraduate years, mostly as supplementary materials for class projects and final essays.

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"Building a Subterranean Knowledge or

Cartographies of Disappearance"

Caro Campos

April 2022

Paper Collage

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"Building a Subterranean Knowledge or

Cartographies of Disappearance"

Caro Campos

April 2022

Paper Collage

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"Building a Subterranean Knowledge or

Cartographies of Disappearance"

Caro Campos

April 2022

Paper Collage

"Dear Mother,"

Caro Campos

May 2021

Paper Collage

In response to the news of forced sterilizations at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, I created a collage to map the histories of reproductive violence and the intersections with migration and race/racism. figures in the collage include Fannie Lou Hamer pointing to Dawn Wooten, the whistleblower, and images from my own camera roll from organizing and art made by detained women in migrant detention centers.

"The Fine Art of Coming Soon: Matriculation Now"

Caro Campos

March 2020

Paper Collage

Beginning in fall 2019, (what was then called) DREAMers on Grounds (now undocUVA) began a matriculation campaign to urge UVA to change its enrollment policy to allow undocumented students to enroll. I made this collage to not only discuss the politics of the University and our demands regarding matriculation, but to also illuminate the "fine art" of postponing and delaying demands.

"For Selam"

Caro Campos

June 2019

Paper Collage

I made this collage for a dear friend when she graduated high school.

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"The Flowing Mosque - Touba, Senegal"

Caro Campos & Sophie Gibson

October 2021

Paper Collage

This collage was made for a religious studies course on Islam in Africa Through the Arts. Tasked with designing or visualizing a mosque in a particular African city to address a social/political/economic issue, my partner and I collaged/mapped a "flowing mosque" based in Touba, Senegal to discuss the ongoing water crisis and the community's response. We learned about mosque design elements through the lens of Islam and Islamic architectural and urban history.

Caro Campos

radicarol.com

2024

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