Romeo Gongora –

November 2025

From September 8 to 11, 2025, I began my residency at the Foreman Art Gallery by getting to know the Guatemalan communities in Sherbrooke. This first visit allowed me to develop ties with the territory and those who shape it: businesses, organizations, community spaces, and migrants.

In particular, I met with the team from AIDE – Actions interculturelles de développement – et d’éducation (Intercultural Development and Education Actions), with whom the project will focus on the realities experienced by Guatemalan temporary foreign workers. These initial exchanges raised a series of essential questions: how can we make these often invisible presences visible? What artistic actions can promote the recognition and transmission of their experiences?

While walking around Sherbrooke, I spoke with shopkeepers and community members who told me about the struggles they went through to settle here. Their stories, marked by perseverance and dignity, reveal an invisible thread connecting work and food. People work to feed themselves, to feed their families back in Guatemala, to feed Quebec and those it welcomes, and also to feed businesses.

This essential workforce, which we nonetheless turn invisible, resonates all the more strongly given the anti-immigration rhetoric in Quebec’s political landscape: exploited when the need arises to be fed, then presented as a threat once our bellies are full. Through these voices and actions, the political substance of subsistence reveals the invisible chains of migrant labor, where hospitality and hostility coexist in today’s Quebec.

This blog will document the different stages of the residency until its presentation at the Foreman Art Gallery in the fall of 2026.