My name is Christopher Rey Pérez. I was born on September 7th or 9th in the year 1987 and raised along these coordinates, 26 11'6"N 98 7'4"W, which make up part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, a region a few miles from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
I am a poet working from within a matrix of opaque folklore, violence, and language in an attempt to embody the "open root" of the border. After living and working in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, my poetics have come to address borders as places where writing can map global exchange.
My first "full-length" book was published in 2017. Titled gauguin's notebook, it writes through Gauguin's Tahitian journal to investigate current-day affective structures along the border vis-a-vis Gauguin's colonialist production in Tahiti. In 2023, I published my second collection. Fayuca is a book on markets and the circulation of objects, people, and desire.
Other writing includes a small chapbook with a few drawings from 2012, a 2015 chapbook of writings and photographs I published in Mexico City, a 2016 artist book with the artist Barbara Ess, a pamphlet for a book collection from Cyprus, an electronic publication on border theatrics, a risograph-printed story that is also translated to Portuguese, a field journal in Spanish, written in Puerto Rico, a book I edited on aliens, and my latest chapbook: Future Tourism.
Since 2013, I've published a bookwork called Dolce Stil Criollo. It is a project between Gabriel Finotti and me that is in the process of becoming a press.
Currently, I teach in the MFA programs at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and at Pratt Institute.
If you would like to know more about me, you could always write me at christopherreyperez (at) gmail (dot) com.
Dolce Stil Criollo
Dolce Still Criollo is a neologism that invokes its own complexity. The publication derives from Dante’s inferno in order to establish itself in the Americas, where it serves as a platform for topical works investigating Latin America’s cultural-political sphere. Both its editorial line and experimental design seek to create a multilingual readership capable of reading across social registers.
Dolce Stil Criollo’s first issue explored the concept of “islands” as a dematerialized, intermediary space of possibility and border. The second issue, Beauty is Our Spiritual Guernica, proposed an aesthetics based on embodied vernaculars of signage and play and was published in partnership with Meli-Melo Press of Brazil. Both issues were printed using Risograph duplicators and were sold in art book fairs in Latin America, United States and Europe. Dolce Stil Criollo’s third issue explores how “tropical opacity” is a political mode of being that acknowledges the constructed nature of the tropical as nothing more than a pedagogical opportunity for its own re-imagining. The works within this issue respond to cultural factors from a globalized era in which knowledge and subjectivity are colonially determined, geo-politically situated, and economically conditioned.
The publication is edited by me and designed by Gabriel Finotti of the Brazilian design studio Sometimes Always.
Dolce Stil Criollo is in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Visit the website.
Issue 1: Zine A5, 72pgs, 170grs conext green cover, 80gsm evercopy inners, side-stapled, one color risograph print in federal blue. Edition of 200. Self-published in Leeds, U.K.. 2013.
Issue 2: Zine A4, 106pgs, multi-format cover, perfect-bound, 2 color risograph print in orange and blue. Edition of 100. Published by Meli-Melo Press in São Paulo, Brazil. 2015.
Issue 3: Book A4, 160pgs, perfect-bound, 4 color offset printing. Edition of 1000. Self-published in São Paulo, Brazil with the help of Adidas, Cotton Project, Alexandre Herchcovitch, and Leograf.
Documentation by Gabriel Finotti.