Flavia Romani Visit!
Posted on December 7, 2020 | posted by: vespa522
This past week, we talked to Flavia Romani, who is a multidisciplinary artist from Venezuela. She has worked in many different mediums, ranging from creative direction to graphic design. She is also a very collaborative person and is focused on making art that is both effective to the community and effective in the development of her own self. She started off as a video editor working on various documentary films, and eventually took the leap to launching Vice-Versa Magazine, an online Spanish publication focused on bringing attention to the nuances and intricacies of the LatinX community.
We started off our interview by asking about the challenges in combining art and politics in the LatinX community and how these can be brought to attention through the online publication, Vice-Versa. She replied by saying that there are enormous challenges, especially when writing about the art. She found that bringing attention to the political nature in the art may need to be spelled out at times and intertwining the politics to topical arts helps the community become more aware and understand the current political climate.
Another interesting point she made was during her answer of having political biases in her writing and editorial work. She talked about how the magazine and the team has a certain set of core values that they follow when conducting interviews that are focused on helping the LatinX community and bringing attention to problems that need addressing. She also mentioned that along with these core beliefs, they don’t not shy away from sharing the other side of the story as well and helping members of the LatinX community form their own decisions and help them better understand different perspectives.
Flavia expanded on the “kaleidoscopic” impact of COVID-19 in the Latinx community. One of the new projects they’ve created is a series of interviews with artists on their surroundings during the quarantine and how they are dealing with the creative process through virus. They also analyzed the political, economic and social impact of the pandemic and what they think the world will look like afterwards. They have compiled a photo-essay of the pandemic that can be found on their website.
Flavia delved deeper into the challenges of being a politics LatinX writer in the United States and what differences did she face when making the change from Latin America. She was surprised to find that in the United States politics are more categorized. She explains this through the example of art, when looking into an artist you expect to find a specific series of works. If an artwork does not fit into that profile of work it can be left out and not considered. She explains the extents of diversity within the LatinX community that cant be fit into a single categorization. This makes the general outlook on politics within the United States harder to tackle as entire communities with very diverse backgrounds are hard to fit into a small box.