ARTLAB RESIDENCY 2025-2026
Récits guatémaltèques en Estrie
October 2025 – September 2026
Artist
Romeo Gongora
Curator
Camila Vásquez
Overview
During the ArtLab 2025-26 residency, Romeo Gongora is developing a project based on the realities experienced by Guatemalan diasporas in Estrie, in partnership with AIDE – Actions interculturelles de développement et d’éducation – a Sherbrooke community organization committed to the inclusion and rights of immigrants and refugees. Together, the artist and AIDE are developing a participatory action research approach with Guatemalan temporary foreign workers in the region.Through co-creation workshops, the artist explores the invisible traces of migrant labor that inhabit our daily lives. The recorded encounters will offer the public a sensitive experience of migration, in a decolonial approach attentive to memory, minority voices, and diasporic ties.The project seeks to create spaces for co-creation and dialogue, where stories of migratory experiences become material for transmission, memory, and work. By forging links between the art space, local communities, and the Guatemalan diaspora, Récits guatémaltèques en Estrie questions the visibility, dignity, and place of migrant voices in the social and cultural fabric of the Estrie region.
Artist
Romeo Gongora Romeo Gongora is a visual artist and professor at the School of Visual and Media Arts at UQAM. Born in Montreal to Guatemalan parents, he has developed a participatory artistic practice rooted in social issues, diasporic experiences, and decolonial approaches. His projects take the form of collaborative workshops, performances, publications, and installations that highlight the voices and knowledge of diasporic communities. As director of the Laboratoire d’art et de recherche décoloniaux (LabARD), he collaborates with researchers, artists, and organizations in Canada and internationally. His approach aims to build spaces for co-creation where art becomes a tool for collective memory and transformation.
Curator
Camila Vásquez is an interdisciplinary artist of Chilean origin. She lives and works in the Estrie region of Quebec, on the ancestral lands of the W8banaki Nation. She has been active in the arts since 2005 as an artist, curator, trainer, mediator and cultural worker. Her artistic practice is embodied in everyday life and develops into long-term projects that challenge the boundaries separating art from other spheres of life, as well as dominant conceptions of social space and knowledge. Her work has been presented in various art centers, galleries and events in Argentina, Chile, Spain and Quebec, including 3e impérial centre d’essais en art actuel, Centre d’art Rozynski, Galerie B-312, Galerie d’art Foreman, Praxis art actuel, Péristyle Nomade, VIVA! Art Action and DARE-DARE, as well as independently and furtively. Since 2022, she is the coordinator of the Foreman Art Gallery’s Community Art Lab at Bishop’s University.
