Victor Arroyo

I am an artist, researcher and social activist, working with experimental and documentary filmmaking practices, video-art and video installation.

My work is concerned with the iconography of formats -the social associations that images evoke, such as how super 8mm evokes intimacy, handheld of home movies, and video of immediacy and surveillance-, but also with the changing nature of revolutionary praxis, what’s often referred to as political and activist art. I developed a dialogue between overloaded categories, such as political, oppositional and subversive art, to encourage reflection, not only about the efficacy of artistic forms of resistance, but also about the very nature of political art.

I am interested in material culture, the transnational, critical theory and postmodern geography, utilizing such notions as discursive diasporas’, geographies of exclusion, and structural violence. My research and practice deals with the disappearance of personal and collective memory and how, through political and activist art, novel configurations of memory can be re-instituted.

I was born in 1977 in the city of Leon in Mexico, from the marriage between Reynaldo Arroyo and Leticia Avila. I moved to Montreal to live with my only sister, Ivon, in 2004. I’m happily married to Anggie since 2009 and we both consider Montreal our new home. Leonardo-Kai, our son, was born in December 2011. He is now learning to talk, calling me Papa every morning. We are all together in this dance.