EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Yali Romagoza
I am a Cuban-born interdisciplinary artist whose work discusses issues of migration and the effects of displacement trauma on the body. I use performance, video installations, photography, and costume design within my work. Because of my positionality as a Cuban immigrant, I created an alter-ego, Cuquita The Cuban Doll, as a strategy for rebuilding a cultural home within the U.S. art scene, where I often do not feel included or represented. Through my alter-ego, I illustrate how I inhabit an in-between cultural space of belonging and nonbelonging and address feminist marginalization while poking fun at the misogynistic and racist stereotypes that particularly plague Latinas in the U.S. My alter-ego references ‘cuquitas cubanas’, a paper doll cutout distributed in magazines in Cuba during my childhood; instead of Barbies, I played with Cuquitas and Cuquita The Cuban Doll is how I render myself visible within this U.S context. As a child, I endured the trauma of living through the great economic depression in Cuba. During this time, I found refuge within myself and understood my body as a space for survival. I build my work from part of this autobiographical story and this in turn becomes a platform where I get to share the vulnerability, displacement, and otherness that I have experienced. Through my work, I raise critical questions about the erasure of Latina diasporic artists within the U.S. art system and encourage viewers to reflect on issues of discrimination and social injustice. My background as a fashion designer supports me with expanding the aesthetic of Cuquita The Cuban Doll by crafting unique costumes that shift the behavioral patterns of my body. These shifts in embodied presence illuminate the themes I am wrestling with, through and beyond the artistic spaces I occupy.
