Christopher Gregory-Rivera's El Gobierno Te Odia is an Orwellian experience. A systemized approach to governmental personal invasion is brought to life in Gregogy-Rivera's 2023 Risograph, combining images from a decades-long surveillance program implemented by the Puerto Rican Police, FBI, and CIA with text from the original surveillance manual. An agenda intended to check rebellion against governmental forces, in part, exerted its power through the coopting of Puerto Ricans. Whether from pressure for complicity, threats, or bribes, ordinary citizens surveilled their neighbors' friends and loved ones. The project and the reality bring into question: who can we really trust?  Is our government, community, and family as capable of betraying us as they are of loving us?  Questions that underscore how far a state will go to silence any perceived threats, invading the most important of relationships and sense of safety to instill compliance.

LM: What elements of your personal and professional life drew you to this research, this project?

CGR: The project started in 2013 when I was covering Congress and the White House for the New York Times when the Snowden revelations were uncovered. A lot of people reacted with the sentiment that if they had nothing to hide, they had no problem with the government watching them. I reacted to that by saying that this had happened in Puerto Rico to very real consequences, so I started researching the program and photographing it to understand it for myself.

LM: The text and the manual bring the locus of control to the surveillance teams. The power to make choices is seemingly being stripped from those being watched. What agency did you feel in making this work?

CGR: The project, at its core, is about systems of surveillance. While the personal stories of those affected are at the forefront of my mind, I have documented them in other ways. To me, this book project was primarily to bring into focus the gaze of the state. It is so rare to have insight into the ways the government sees politically counter-hegemonic forces in society, so I thought it best to use the material to create a tool to understand that frame of mind. The book asks specifically: "By understanding that gaze, can we come to understand the current civil society it built? If so, does that allow us to dismantle its control over us now?"

As a Puerto Rican artist photographing in Puerto Rico, I realized that the systemic issues I was documenting are rooted in attitudes and realities. When you look closely at the surveillance systems, you see aspects of engineering that create those attitudes and perceptions. So, it's my hope that projects like mine can provide tools to reverse engineer those attitudes and create those that respond to the communities they come from and ultimately lead to self-determination in the colonial context.

LM: At this moment, how do you experience and value privacy? Is there a gap between expectation and reality?

CGR: To me, the book is most powerful, including modern-day surveillance. The leaked images of surveillance video from 2017 are a direct way to explain that these practices, although "deduct," are still alive culturally and in practice amongst the police in Puerto Rico and in any modern policed society. So, by showing exactly the type of techniques and gazes used, I hope that viewers can better understand how seemingly innocuous watching can have a real chilling effect on society. It is not whether you have something to hide but rather the fact that you know you are constantly being watched will affect and ultimately atrophy a healthy civil society.

In How to grow una flor en el desierto, Alina Patrick takes on difficult truths about her own past, the suffering of women in her family, and the complex impacts of intergenerational trauma. In the making of this project, she conveyed a sense of hope and trust in the artistic process. Using old family photographs, newly made images from her family place of origin, and original poetry, she aims for growth, acceptance, and change.

There is a risk in confronting what has brought unbearable pain, that the feelings will overwhelm us once more. There is also the hope that exploration and connection will bring a relief from the often-frozen disempowered state of traumatic memories. Alina harnesses the potential of art to shift emotions. In our interview she opens up about the process of making and sharing this work.

LM: This is very personal work, bringing forth your own trauma as well as that of your family. What was your journey in making this book?

AP: I was trying to make sense of events I lived through in my own personal life and then I learned that mirrored traumas had occurred in the lives of many of the women in my family, permeating deeper and wider than I ever knew.

The collages came first during an Archival Photography class I took during my senior year at NYU. It was visceral; the tearing of family pictures and rearranging them to paint a more true image was literally part of the art-making process. But alone, the collages are ambiguous, and I wanted to tell the full story. I have always loved poetry but had never written it. This moment gave me the power to take that on, to put into words what had happened. What I experienced next was about loss and also peace.

I traveled to New Mexico with a camera. It was the first time I had been to the state since my grandmother’s funeral when I was a kid. I traveled to Albuquerque where my mother grew up and Belen where her parents were from. During this trip, I passed places which were described to me all throughout my childhood —the Río Grande Gorge, the Jemez Mountains, the peaks of the Sandías — and saw them with a new understanding of what this place really meant in the context of my family. The black and white images taken there were meant to connect, to somehow be there with the women of my family and find hope.

LM: It seems you were able to use art both to grieve and to move forward. What was the experience of sharing this piece?

AP: Both the public reception and that of my family were positive. Workshopping the poems at the Ornithology Jazz Club, I was presenting really sensitive topics to a room of strangers. Afterwards, people would approach me with their own stories of trauma. The ability to connect with each other's experiences, to feel togetherness in this, it was cathartic.

LM: What was the Risograph fellowship like? Has it influenced the work you are now making?

AP: It was a place where I was given tools, space, and support to complete this work. Outside of a school setting, that is incredibly rare, though it is incredibly important. Once you're working full- time, it would be easy to lose sight of personal work, but this kind of opportunity preserves that.

I am definitely interested in making books about land and history by mixing words and images. I'm actually in another residency right now, where another artist is adapting the book into a choreography piece. It's the same work, but in a very different medium, which is both exciting and challenging.

Paging through Kate Schneider’s How to Understand a Rock was an experience free from any dogmatic agenda. This refreshing exploration evoked the pleasures often reserved for the free play and open exploration of childhood. Kate’s Risograph book brings forward a rocking adventure.

In our interview Kate finds continuity between humor, scientific interest, and compassion that mirrors what is found in her publication. The most ordinary form, a rock, is filled with the excitement of living.

LM: In a world filled with polarizing forces and emotionally laden images you seemingly offer a respite, an alternative, in How to Understand a Rock. What were your considerations of rock as literal presence as well as metaphorical?

KS: Well, the rocks are both literal and metaphorical. The rocks in the book are part of an inter-generational rock collection, and my process for picking a rock is rarely scientific; instead, they have a presence that feels comforting, playful, and familiar to me. So, the very reason why I chose each rock is that it occupies both the physical and allegorical plane. In creating and viewing the images, there is the didactic reading that I’m holding, standing, or balancing a rock, but there is also the pain, joy, and whimsy that comes from interacting in non-conventional ways with each rock.

LM: I found the poetry woven into the work to be so encouraging of reflection. Can you speak to the process of writing and integrating it into the book?

KS: The eponymous poem, How to Understand a Rock, riffs on the seemingly silly ways geologists test rocks – one method that is rarely used, for obvious reasons, is to lick a rock. Say you have two white rocks that are similar in every other testable metric; one way to tell them apart is to lick them. First, I don’t advise running around licking rocks; you never know when you’ll find yourself making out with asbestos. For this book, I loved the idea of trying to understand the unknowable or, from our standpoint, the objectively mute elements in our world. As a child, the process of trying to find out what rock or mineral I was holding felt like creating a kinship or connection with a new friend, and this deeply scientific process also felt like a form of structured play. In the poem, How to Understand a Rock, I wanted to tap into the duality I felt as a child and still feel when I find a rock that is unknown to me. It’s both science, kinship, and play.

LM: What was your experience in the residency? In the Risograph making process?

KS: I adored my time at Penumbra! The community, the facilities, and the galleries are exceptionally impressive! Equally, the weekend at the Eureka Mindspace facilities in Kingston, New York, was a gift.

Making a risograph book is an arduous process; each colour image has to go through the printer three times, and if you make a mistake, you must start all over again. I don’t want to go into too much detail because it's dull, but let's just say there was stress, tears, and joy, and I would 1000% do it again. I’m planning my next book as we speak.

I do want to give a huge thank you to my partner, Kyle Mills, for assisting me with the self-portraits, Kevin Kundstadt for his support and for answering my endless stream of questions, and my designer, Cristian Ordóñez.

LM: Personally, looking at this work filled me with a desire for adventure and discovery. What were the responses you hope for in sharing this work?

KS: The element of play is foundational to this work. I started this project early on in the pandemic, and like all of us, I was feeling anxiety, fear, and grief. Throughout my life, rocks have been a grounding tool when I’m feeling stressed, but frankly, I simply enjoy their presence. In this work, I wanted to talk about the sensory aspect of geology, which is not discussed enough, and how these objects we seemingly dismiss hold us every day. I also was not interested in discussing auras or any of that crystal crap; instead, I wanted to be more base – what do joy and play have to do with having a relationship with place? In my mind, it has everything to do with such a relationship, and we need more play and joy in our lives.