Demographic

Age: 36
Gender identity: Male         

Race: Brown: Latin American

Indigenous: Yes – he has indigenous ancestry.

Class: Working class

Other identity (e.g. linguistic, religious): Born as a Roman catholic; believes in some spiritual stuff even though he doesn’t practice any religious rituals anymore

Education: MFA in Contemporary Arts

Language: Spanish, English, and French

Personal responsibilities: married without children.

Location: Originally from Guadalajara, Mexico. He is a migrant living currently in Vancouver, BC, but has lived for 3 years in Chicago, US, during his master’s degree.

Widgets: Tools & Platforms

• Flagging Harmful Language – Description Audit
• Curation – Ponga
• IIIF – Mirador
• Visualization – Gist

Brief Biography

Lucas Santos is a brown-Latin American migrant living in Vancouver, Canada. He is originally from Mexico and has lived in the US. He has a Master of Fine Arts degree in Contemporary Arts and works as an independent artist in the lower mainland. He is familiar with technology, despite being stubborn with them sometimes. He uses AtoM almost daily and would like a new form of looking for and approaching archives could exist. He often gets frustrated when doing his search for archives through collections or fonds, mostly because of the language used. His work projects representation of a marginalized community and tries to decolonize archival practice.

Character description

Lucas has strong ethical and decolonial principles in his practice. He is stubborn sometimes to learn new stuff, e.g., a new programming language, but learns easily after few times spent on it. Even though he works daily with archives, because of the offensive language he encounters each now and them, Lucas got short tempered in archival researches. He loves his artistic work and believes in it; he knows the importance of his practice. However, it is very tiring.

Interest in archives & Life experience

Why interested in archives: Lucas currently works as a part-time curatorial assistant at an arts gallery in the Lower Mainland. He uses archives for primary source research as the basis of the galleries’ exhibits. For his own artistic practice, his primary source are still archives as he investigates Latin American migration in Canada.

Community affiliations: He is a member of the Canada Council for the Arts. Also, he is an active member in his neighborhood as he lives in a co-op building with his family and friends.

Represented in archives: Yes, he’s ever seen archives about Latin American migrants in Canada and the US since he started his post-secondary studies. However, he felt that these archives carried colonial stigma; he’s drawn to archives as he reimagine the forms in which people perceive, read, and interact with them.

Professional affiliations: Canadian Historical Association, Mexico Historical Society.

Access needs and mobility: N/A

Motivations

Why: As a migrant himself and as an active advocate of EDI principles, he understands the importance of this artistic practice.

Frustrations

Barriers: Lucas can’t search collections by topic or by how they look. That being said, he has to thoroughly navigate through fonds and collections but rarely utilize what he finds on them because of their abusive language or lack of contextualization. Most of the time, the archives of Latin American migrants in Canada carry harmful language or stereotypes that he wants to denounce through his practice. Therefore, he sees himself on a tight rope: how to bring light to these problems without perpetuating them? How could archival search engines catalogue archives in a non-harmful way? How could he transform the ways in which people perceive archives?

Info and Tech Access & Experience

Hardware: High skilled with MacOs and Windows desktop devices, and mobile.

Software: Expertise in MS and Google apps, Adobe Package, especially image and video post-processing software. He has some knowledge of web design and knows some programing languages.

Network connectivity: He has reliable internet and mobile connection.

Experience with archival tools: Lucas is skilled in the use of AtoM and Collective Access. He’s used other platforms in the past, like Islandora.

Experience with archival frameworks: He knows how to access archives and investigate the hierarchy of things; however, Lucas wanted to do searches for archives visually, that there was a way to search archives through how they look.

Comfort with learning technology: Even though he might be reluctant at the beginning as he finds comfort in what he already knows, he learns new tech easily.

Goals

What do they want to do: Lucas wants to curate archives in his exhibitions to propose new forms of looking and interpret archives. He wants to share a decolonial approach to archives.

What relationship do they want to the archives: A critical interaction to archives: accessing images or videos from AtoM or physical spaces (for later digitalization), and then re-interpret them through a decolonial lenses.