By: Brian Nguyen
One can probably say with certainty that there are not many award-winning curators who have dressed up like a giant papaya. But that’s a mental image I can’t shake since catching up with Liz Ferrer in a Zoom call last week. After receiving a BFA in Theatre, this Miami-based artist uses her performance pieces to challenge and question traditional social constructs. Liz’s work spans beyond her abstract performance art, her experimental films and photography. She also helps provide a voice and platform for those who are less represented. Ferrer acknowledges that people might find her art off-putting, with her refusing to stick to one medium and frequently creating pieces driven by uncommon themes that make people uncomfortable. She leans into that discomfort by dissecting racism and homophobia, forcing intense visuals and actions that disrupts people’s ideas of social norms, and making them question, “what is real and what is not.” Through the interview, we discuss her past projects and the challenges of working with a diverse group of people.
What is your field of art?
Liz Ferrer:
I am a visual artist. I’m a performance artist, a filmmaker, and a photographer. A lot of my work in the last six years has been with my collaborator, “Bowtie.” Bowtie is a coder, animator, and is also a performance artist.
What is your background? Do you find it to influence your art in any way?
Well, if we’re going to talk about culture, my family’s Cuban and that does influence my art. I also identify as Queer which influences my work too. Now, if you’re talking about technical background, I actually went to school for theater. I’m a performer at heart, but now I’m a little too experimental for the theater world. When I was younger, I was still figuring out my voice and stuff. I was like, “I don’t really fit in here.” But then I started becoming friends with a bunch of artists in Miami and I was like, “oh, this seems more like me,” and I just started experimenting. My work at first was experimental theater. I did a few pieces that were a mix of experimental theater with performance art. This was years ago— maybe a little bit over 10 years ago— where I started developing more into a performance artist.
I did a lot of curating for performance art festivals. I started working with the Borscht Film Festival, they’re my friends and they needed a hand. You know how it is—doing micro-budget films and stuff with friends. I started working in films and then I started wanting to create videos myself. So yeah, I was doing a lot of directing in the beginning and I’m still doing directing now. First, it was for live stuff, but now my work looks more like performance art, video art, and filmmaking. The animation side and all that comes from my collaborator, Bowtie.
Do you find your current living environment affects the way you create art?
My family’s Caribbean. So I don’t know. There’s something. I feel a little bit at home here because we have a mix of everything and there’s a lot of people from all over the Caribbean, Latin America, and everything. It helps me feel comfortable to be myself in that way here. But also a lot of people like to come to Miami, a lot of creatives. We have the Art Basel Fair, which brings in a lot of people every year. People naturally want to come here, it’s a nice little break. Miami is a very Interesting, but weird-ass place. You get away with a lot here, if you can speak Spanish, you can get away with things. Like if you want to shoot somewhere you’re not supposed to, if you want to blow a firework somewhere, if you want to blow up a car on the side of the road or by the Everglades, no one’s going to see it. You could just say “my friends did that!” You can get away with bending a lot of rules in Miami. If you act like the people you’re charming, then you could get very experimental. I think that freedom also affects my work a lot. I feel like I can get away with a lot, you know? So it’s just having that spirit inside—even if a lot of the work is animated or fantasy or whatever—it’s just all connected. If I felt I was trapped, I don’t know if I’d be able to create like that.
What inspires you to make the sort of work you create?
Um, I mean I’m crazy! So is Bow—it’s not just me, the work that you saw is both me and Bow. For example, the telenovela, the one with my grandma in it. That one is very easy to tell you how I got inspired. My grandma came from Cuba, she was really poor and lived in an orphanage. Her mom had her when she was young—a very crazy story. Cubans have a really difficult history and she always wanted to be a performer, but she was never able to do that. I was born in California and she’s always been there taking care of family and stuff, but she never had the opportunity to be a performer like she wanted. My whole family is creative but they never had a chance to express it. My grandpa was a dancer and singer, never had a chance. My dad was also very performative and stuff, never had a chance. So when I was like, “I feel this spark inside and I have the privilege to explore it,” I did. I’m not in Cuba and I was raised in a different generation, I want to take advantage of this and fully express myself. My dad’s death also made me feel like I could be even wilder because my dad won’t see it too, but I mean I wish he could see it… Then when my grandpa died, and because my grandparents raised me and I was close to them, that also pushed me more. I’m like “I need to just push my brain, body, ideas, politics, everything.
Has your family had any influence on your work?
You know, my grandpa died some years back. My dad died years ago and it really sucks, but I think that’s actually where a lot of my wildness comes from: loss. When my dad died, I was 23 and I’ve always been wild and stuff, but I wasn’t doing this kind of work back then. I’m 36 now so it’s been a while. Losing my dad really shocked me and really changed my brain. It really made me want to stop holding myself back. I started traveling. I started putting myself in more extreme situations. I changed a lot about myself. You think I’m wild? Like you should see some of my friends, compared to them I’m not that wild! I started hanging out with crazy performance artists in New York and putting myself in situations where my friends are like, “damn Liz, like, what are you doing?” I’m like “I’m experimenting, you know?” Losing my dad made me feel like I need to just live my life and really find who I am and not be scared to be who I am. That is the main inspiration of my work: loss.
What made you decide to include your family in your art?
It’s just that my abuela has always wanted to be a performer. One day it just hit me, we should just do a telenovela (Spanish soap opera) starring her! She’s getting older, she’s getting weaker, she has Parkinson’s. Let’s just try. Let’s see if she wants to do it. She wanted to do it. Now her love interest was someone that she actually had a crush on in real life—Otto Von Schirach, he’s also a crazy experimental artist and a musician. He’s been doing it since he was 14, now he does tours in Europe every year and is well known in Germany, and people know him down here too! He’s basically playing himself in the telenovela.
When my grandpa died, I would throw birthday parties for my grandma with my friends and perform for her. We kept having themes for her birthday and we wanted to top them. We had done one with digital art around the time I met Bow, where he’s like “do you want to do a commercial?” We can just film that at the party and put it on Facebook live, so we did!. She did such a good job everybody’s like “I’m so entertained by your grandma.” And I was like, “fuck it.” Next year she’ll marry Otto, do you guys want to do that?” Everybody was like, “yes!” I was like “wait Bow, this has to be a project! How about a novela where she marries Otto?” So it’s like reality and fiction. She’s not going to marry Otto in real life—I even asked them “do you want to actually make it real?” But no, that’s a little too much. Let’s immortalize, Let’s like make this fantasy come through the film. So it’s like half-real, half-fantasy, but it’s not fake for my grandma.
Olgita La Del Barrio (Una Telenovela con Liz y Bow) from Liz Ferrer on Vimeo.
How would you describe your field of work to someone at a party?
It depends if I want to be funny, I’ll be like “what’s my art? Well, I have a reggaeton band and I make movies. One of them is starring my grandma who is getting married to my friend and we make weird films.”
How would you describe your field of work to a client or someone you want to work with?
Usually, I have to apply for grants. They didn’t meet me beforehand. I apply to things and I have to write in a very stiff way that’s not how I usually talk, you know? If I have to meet them in person… I honestly suck, because the way that I write grants is not the way I talk. I’m like “am I supposed to talk like myself? Cause that’s actually better because people like your real personality. Or am I supposed to talk like a mix of how I wrote for the grant?”
I’m actually learning, I’m trying to learn how I can be myself? I’m professional in a normal job, but if it’s my art it’s different because if you liked my video, then you gotta like me. How would I describe it? It’d be like “I’m a performance artist and filmmaker. We use animations in our work. We’re really interested in themes of displacement within Latinx culture and American Culture.”
What have been some major challenges? What projects have been a learning curve?
We did this underwater opera and we wanted to have it like a giant tank on stage. We had more of a smaller tank on stage, but like the water, the thing was an issue. Our props and our setup were really crazy. The producers were like, “you can’t set that up in two minutes.” And we did. They were scared at first. We climbed over the audience and some of the people in our show were licking people. We had dirty sponges from the sea smelling and putting it over people. Then they’re like “that’s too much like, what the fuck.” And yet we still did it.
I’ve pushed myself a lot to do things that are very uncomfortable. That’s not my work now—that’s when I was hanging out with those really weird performance artists. Which they’re my best friends, but I’m not doing that work anymore. I met Bow and I was like “okay, I’m not going to do that work with you guys. I’m going to focus on this shit now. I can’t do that.”
What is personally your favorite piece that you’ve worked on and why?
My grandma [the Telenovela]. It’s my grandma—, that’s the one with the most stakes. She’s also going to be 89 this year. You know? That short video is just the trailer for it, that’s not the finished thing. So it’s like time., like “Iis she going to be alive by the time we finish?” is a question we have. But the other part of it is like, it is also kind of finished. She’s an actor, and more people know who she is. From other countries and other states, they’re like “who’s Olgita? How is she? Every time I tell her that, she’s just so happy. She changes her state of being, but she suffers a lot. She has a lot of pain. She can’t walk on her own. It’s a lot of shit. We’ve immortalized her—, that’s the most special, that’s the most special one because of that, you know? So that was an easy question for me. I love her.