Claire BarrerA

Instagram: tlalcihuatlx
vimeo.com/clairebarrera

I am a movement and language-based artist who has lived and worked in Portland, Oregon since 2001. My creative and social practices spring from a life in social justice, healing and youth work and my identities as a trans, queer, chronically ill Xicane mother.  For 20+ years I have worked in anti-violence, youth and art movements, in groups including Dicentra Collective and Brown Girl Rise. My artistic research is born from a need to interrogate my own habits of private sustenance and public action, and community-level patterns of kinship, organizing, care and harm.  I have lived and witnessed harm to marginalized people, as well as our resistance and resilience.  My work is a holistic practice of survival and healing connected to DIY/punk and Latinx values of pedagogy of the oppressed and harm reduction. 

I am passionate about investigating the social patterns that lead to harm and the possibility of creating alternative and liberatory worlds.  I believe communities can find new pathways to change via creative play together.  I collaborate with activist and healing communities to bring the arts as a tool to confront the issues we face, including the very ways we organize and understand ourselves outside of white supremacist emphasis on intellect divorced from the body and heart. How I survive becomes research into how groups have survived historically, and how audiences, communities and performers get by together.

 I pair collaborative poetic work with offerings to the community via DIY community art projects and workshops on embodiment and transformation. Between the early and late 2000s, I helped found both Art and Revolution and Dicentra Collectives.  Both created and promoted community actions and skillshares combining art and social change.  My movement work explored improvisation in public spaces as a platform to confront social inequities. In 2006 I founded the zine When Language Runs Dry: A Zine for People with Chronic Pain and Their Allies, with Meredith Butner.  This zine shared my own and others art at the intersections of disability, justice, trauma and care.  I continue to publish this zine (anthologized by Mend My Dress Press in 2020), and those themes have persisted in my creative and organizing work into the present.  I have brought somatic and creative improvisation tools to anti-violence spaces as well; examples include collaborative practices with young people at Consent Convergence and PSU.

Time in affinity community is inseparable from my work. For example, I run a D&D group with BIPOC youth; the storytelling and world-building strategies we make together have found their way into my studio practice, and build the creative capacity of the young people. To that end, my most recent work has focused heavily on youth liberation and intergenerational collaboration for social change.  In Grammar of the Imagination, I collaborated with 3 Brown Girl Rise (a collective I have been a part of for 5 years) youth and 3 adults to explore intergenerational kinship.  I supported these youth in performing as professional artists in Portland and Seattle, and sitting as experts on a panel for youth artists. 

Bio

claire barrera is an artist, activist and educator based in Portland, Oregon.  Their recent work includes the intergenerational performance Grammar of the Imagination.  Upcoming work includes choreography for Allie Hankins and the project in but with or on in to with Maya Dalinsky.  They co-edit the zine When Language Runs Dry and are an auntie with the collective Brown Girl Rise.