Sell Out, A Series: 5 Questions with Daniela Guerrero-Rodriguez

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Sell Out is a series by interdisciplinary artist Angela Fama (she/they), who co-creates conversations with individual artists across Vancouver. Questioning ideas of artistry, identity, “day jobs,” and how they intertwine, Fama settles in with each artist (at a local café of their choice) and asks the same series of questions. With one roll of medium format film, Fama captures portraits of the artist, after the verbal conversations have been had. 

Daniela Guerrero-Rodriguez (she/they) is a queer Latinx femme of mixed European, African, and Indigenous Central American ancestry, currently a settler on the stolen lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. They are an educator, artist, and community builder. Follow them on Instagram @danielagr.co or visit their website at www.danielagrconsulting.ca

What do you make/create?

I make co-created creative spaces where the actual art that we’re creating doesn’t matter as much as the relationships we’re creating. Relationships are an art form that we need to perfect. 

The reason I like to do it with art is because when we’re distracted and making something with our hands, we show up in a way that isn’t as shaped by the ‘should’s’ that we have about how we show up. We let our guard down a little bit, and start sharing more of ourselves. We start to be a little bit more honest and, at the end of the day, create something that we can share with others that also communicates what we’re thinking and feeling – if we get to share what we make; if we want to share what we make. 

That is one thing, and then in my personal practice, I sketch as part of my journaling because it helps my mental health. It helps me put out thoughts through images, which is more in line with my communication form, rather than words which don’t always line up when I have to think about how to create a sentence more than just shapes on a page. 

Something I’m exploring for this season is backstrap weaving, which is an ancestral form of weaving from Central America. As I try to connect with my ancestors, who I don’t have any connections with, I feel like maybe putting myself in the position that they would have put themselves in as they were creating textiles will help me reflect on what they were thinking about. What patterns went into their weavings and why? 

What do you do to support that?

Work. I take the money out of the paycheck. I worked in mental health for many years, about twenty years on and off. At the same time, I was doing other kinds of administrative things. 

Mental health was always something I was very excited about, and education most recently. I’m doing decolonizing education. I ran my own business, and I still kind of do for consulting and speaking. Now I’m part of an organization that likes to have a decolonial lens on the curriculum that they share, which is predominantly leadership for social change oriented stuff.

The small community things have usually been grants, or funded by me, because I think this is a fun way to connect with people. They’ve been kind of one-off, or for a season, not continual. The stuff I do for myself, I don’t know if there’s anything to support besides just making the time to do it. 

In this new project that I have, I’m super excited because I think it’s the first time that I have purposefully sought to make space for other folks in my creative process, and allowed them to support me. I actually have a friend that has found a grant for me, another friend that has found a potential Mayan knowledge keeper to teach me, and a space where they will allow me to go and do my things. What does it look like to share your dream? I’m really excited to move into this and allow for it to be fulfilled without forcing it to happen. This has been a little bit of a dream for the past few months. 

 Describe something about how your art practice and your “day job” interact.

Going back to mental health, obviously, mental health is very taxing. I was working in mental health for twenty years, on and off because it is exhausting and I needed a place that made me happy. Doing art, seeing art, or colors would be things that would bring me joy throughout the day, which could be quite long. 

How do I bring art into my day in little ways that are sustainable, when the days can be quite busy and long? That’s kind of where the sketching came from. Understanding that, I was also communicating with a lot of folks that didn’t have the words to express what they were feeling but could use art to do it. 

I predominantly worked with kids and brought sketching into the workplace. I encouraged folks to use art to communicate with me how we can move forward in our plans (usually care plans). We created solutions for how to manage behavioral issues that would come up for them; to identify where feelings would arise that would cause these behavioral issues to happen. 

I got a master’s in Arts for Social Change because I was interested in how we could create policy together for folks that couldn’t communicate what they needed through words but could in art. How could we use art to influence policy? I found out the government doesn’t care, doesn’t want to know, so I left that. 

That’s when I started doing these small community gatherings with folks that wanted to do art and build relationships. I ended up in education using art as a way for us to process the feelings that arise when we’re faced with difficult knowledge to process about the world around us and how we show up in it. 

The weaving came out of me trying to get further into how, or what, my process could look like when I don’t have access to information. What other ways can I glean information which I think is in my body? That’s why I think putting myself in a weaving position physically could inform that.

What’s a challenge you’re facing, or have faced, in relation to this and/or what’s a benefit?

A challenge would be definitely wanting to sit with this longer. The sketching, I’d love to just have a sabbatical where I learn how to illustrate in a way that I want to, just getting to practice.  Perhaps have someone mentor me in how to draw better so I can communicate more clearly to myself, because it’s not for anybody else. 

Another challenge is funding for larger community projects and community support, which are mostly funded out of pocket. Like last summer, I was traveling for forty-five minutes on the bus with a huge wagon with all my supplies to go do an art-based community gathering in a spot where there was supposed to be community support but it didn’t happen. 

I’m thinking of the stuff that I’m trying to do now, the weaving stuff, which has been super cool. I think there’s a lot more support going into it maybe because I wasn’t the one to initiate it past just expressing my desire for it. That’s been very interesting to see how sometimes the world collects what you need around you to support you in doing it rather than having you have to push through it at all costs to get something done. I’m trying to tap into that energy more now. 

I think all of it has always been for connection and community. Those are very important to me. I don’t have enough energy to have close relationships with a lot of folks but I do really enjoy having folks that I bump into all the time, like in my neighborhood and stuff. A lot of these community things were in my neighborhood so I could get to know them, so I could get to have neighbors to see on the street and meet at a designated place at a designated time all together. 

I think acknowledging our energies and how we function in the world is important as well, so we’re not pushing past our energy in order to deliver in the way that the world has told us to deliver. A way which might be on a schedule that doesn’t suit us, or with energy that we don’t have. And instead, try to be a little bit more authentic about it.

Have you made, or created, anything that was inspired by something from your day job? Please describe.

I recently have been looking at how the natural world influences our relationships. One of the things that has been super exciting is to look at curriculum and be able to learn about how nature would create a structure that we could align our curriculum to. For example, we have an idea of how to introduce folks to a different way of showing up at work that goes through an internal examination of what your energy is, what your values are, what you desire in your life and how to put it into practice. 

What in nature has these things and what might this process look like in nature? One of the things that came up looks like a germinating seed. It looks like creating a space with this class where we just sit and take in this information in a way that is sustainable. Looking at the seed and what processes are happening during germination, at what times: when is it that is slow, when is it that it is fast, and how much stuff is coming in at these different phases? 

Having a curriculum that follows that so we have artistic representation of it which also informs our curriculum, and the relationships – relationships that we’re creating with the students as facilitators and that the students are creating amongst themselves. 

Understanding that we can move at the pace of plants. That we can take in as much information as we need and, sometimes, we don’t need that information because we can’t take it in, and neither would a plant, so that’s ok. Looking at that and looking at budgeting, what budgeting looks like if we were to illustrate it according to a plant in nature knowing what our goal as an organization is. 

For example, we work with folks that want to become leaders of social change. We also know that we [as facilitators] want to become temporary. For us to fulfill our long-term goal we have to become obsolete. What in nature does this regenerative work and then becomes obsolete? 

One of the things locally is the Alder tree which shows up after a forest fire to clean up all the nitrogen and restore the soil. It has quite a short life because it has done its job. What can we learn about the Alder tree in order to inform our budging? How can we illustrate that in ways that inform the relationships we want to have with money, funders, community support that’s in-kind, and the folks that we teach? 

I think another important part of that is the legacy that we leave: how does our relationship with all of this influence folks generations down the line and the changes that will create? 

Angela Fama (she/they) is an artist, Death Conversation Game entrepreneur, photographer, musician, previous small-business server of many years (The Templeton, Slickity Jim’s etc.). They are mixed generation settler currently working on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations.

Follow them at IG @angelafama IG @deathconversationgame or www.angelafama.com