Upon entering his studio at the Fine Arts Work Center, one might easily imagine that José De Sancristóbal is one of the writing fellows here for the winter. The walls are mostly bare, and two worktables are covered in typed pages. On one table are pages of a text he’s annotating; on the other is something he’s writing for his final project. On top are books: Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Saidiya Hartman. There’s also a small red hardback, Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo’s 1955 masterpiece of early magical realism, a story of the dispossessed against the powerful in which the characters freely traverse the boundaries between life and death.
“It’s a book every Mexican has to read in high school, the novel par excellence of Mexico,” Sancristóbal says.
Not lost among the books and papers are the actual tools of his art: two digital cameras, a small handheld camera, a Super 8 camera, and a laptop, where the splicing and editing are done.
Sancristóbal is very much a visual artist. But his photography and videography installations include language, translation, and text. He is interested in the question of identity, specifically how identity can transcend notions of nationality. He’s into the idea of translatability, which he says is not just about words.
“Translatability proposes a model where cultural difference is not bound specifically to notions of the state and the government,” he says. Instead, it’s more about “knowing who talks how and how you get embedded in a community.”
Having lived and studied in two cultures and two languages, he perhaps knows this viscerally. Sancristóbal’s formal studies in Mexico culminated at the Universidad de Monterrey, where he received a B.F.A. He then came to Illinois for an M.F.A. at Northwestern University.
Sancristóbal’s work in Mexico was rooted in family history. Notes on the Translation of ‘El Solitario’ (or Preface to the English Edition) was his first major video work, completed in 2023. Filmed in Chicago, Tapachula, and Guatemala, it’s a 28-minute two-channel video. It layers family history, text, and translation.
Translation begins with a split screen that was filmed to look like a single screen with a mirror down the center. On one side is Sancristóbal, describing the process of translating El Solitario, a novella written 70 years ago by his grandfather, whose name was also José De Sancristóbal. On the other side, is a “reflected” Sancristóbal, who reads the original text as the narrator. It’s a piece that purposefully conflates the past, the present, the fictional, and the autobiographical — with a nod to magical realism.
The film’s final image is a panoramic view of the Suchiate River, which runs between Mexico and Guatemala, with a lone figure crossing it in a raft. The figure could represent his grandfather — or anyone. The image is cinematic and accompanied by the sound of rain that lingers long after Translation has ended.
Sancristóbal was born in Monterrey in the state of Nuevo León. His grandfather was an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who had settled there and opened a photo studio that eventually became the family business. His father taught him photography. Yet central to his work is the question of whether the camera can be a documentary tool — and relatedly, what a photograph is.
“I think there is something wrong in our conception of the subject,” he says. The camera may be the cause: We think of it as an objective eye that describes the world, but the truth is that the camera actually constructs its subjects. To photograph a suspect of a crime, for example, is to assume a priori some degree of guilt, he says.
He is interested in the way that images are used in courtrooms, surveillance, and state documents. The way we talk about photography is revealing, he says: “The use of ‘capture,’ the use of ‘shooting.’ There is some violence in it.”
Co/lapse (Unrevised Edition), which Sancristóbal started in New York while enrolled in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program last year and finished during his fellowship here, continues a trajectory started with Translation. The 33-minute single-channel video alternates between scenes of a restaurant kitchen in New York where undocumented immigrants are at work and a studio where Sancristóbal and two other actors recreate Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (1601).
Emmaus, which was located in current-day Palestine, is where Jesus appeared to two disciples after his crucifixion and resurrection. According to the Biblical story, Jesus had been previously unrecognizable to them. It was only when he moved to the head of the table to break bread as host that they realized who he was. Scholars believed that Caravaggio used his studio as a camera obscura to project each figure in his painting. Supper at Emmaus is thus a moment in history that combines a proto-photographic image with the concept of recognition.
In Co/lapse, Sancristóbal uses the restaurant to tie in the present. Now, he points out, the lens is used to regulate movement and declare a person’s civil or legal legitimacy. A side story, which is really not so secondary, is a pro-Palestinian protest at the beginning of Co/lapse. Sancristóbal’s focus is not the immigrant experience alone but more broadly identity, belonging, and freedom.
He is working on another project at FAWC: a video and installation based on a scene from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Made in 1936, the film, which incorporates some sound, satirizes machine-age inhumanity with hectic assembly line gags. In it, Chaplin’s silent character, the Tramp, makes his final appearance. Sancristóbal, for his piece, built a set to recreate a scene in which the Tramp is thrown in jail after being mistakenly identified as a Communist leader. Sancristóbal regards the scene as a text and his set as a translation of it.
This two-part work, titled Study for the Translation of ‘Modern Times,’ is on view in two places in Provincetown: the set is in his studio, while the video of it can be seen in the Hudson D. Walker Gallery as part of FAWC’s Fellow Fridays.
Split Screen
The event: A showcase with Dani Levine, José De Sancristóbal, Kai Conradi, and C. Mallon
The time: Friday, March 21, 5 to 8 p.m.
The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
The cost: Free
