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 incorporate the liminality of a type of "border thinking" I have experienced and witnessed throughout my life. After having had the opportunity to live, work, and write in Mexico, the Occupied West Bank of Palestine, and other countries, my writing has evolved to include the investigation and address of borders as a subject-constituting condition rooted in the coloniality of global exchange.
Some of my writing that's representative of these concerns includes a small chapbook with a few drawings that I published with 98Editions of Beirut in 2012, a 2015 chapbook of writings and photographs I published with LIKE Editorial of Mexico City, a 2016 artist book in collaboration with the artist Barbara Ess that was released for the occasion of an exhibition at 321 Gallery in Brooklyn, a book that composes a book collection from Nicosia, Cyprus, an electronic publication on border theatrics published in Canada, a risograph-printed story that is also translated to Portuguese, a field journal in Spanish from an artist fellowship in Puerto Rico, and a book I edited on aliens. My first "full-length" book was published on March 15, 2017. Titled gauguin's notebook, it writes through Gauguin's Tahitian journal as a way of investigating current-day affective structures along the border vis-a-vis Gauguin's colonialist production in Tahiti.
Collaboration plays a large part in how I choose to shape my writing community, and this has led me to create a small publication of art and literature of the Americas, called Dolce Stil Criollo, that I co-edit with my friend, Gabriel Finotti. Nomadic, multi-lingual, and independent, Dolce Stil Criollo is a project we began in 2013. You can learn more here.
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.
427-375
427-375 narrates a problematics of migration, loss, and conquest while submitting itself to the opacity of love and promise. Divided in three parts, the first is a 30 page poem of images and text repurposing the dissemination tactics and aesthetics of narcomantas within public space. The second is a series of 95 questions about Mexico City. The third is a calendar of the month of January 2015.
The pamphlet's title is taken from a chronology from El estudio preliminar by Francisco Montes de Oca that sets the birth of Xenophon at 427 and the year in which he begins his anabasis throughout the Persian Empire at 375.
Pamphlet A5, 48pgs, 285grs stardream silver outers, bond 90grs white inners, side stapled, off-set printing in blood red. Edition of 150 (plus 50 smileys of unknown origins). Designed by me. Published by LIKE Editorial in Mexico City, Mexico. 2015
427-375 is written in Spanish. Documentation by Alain Amateco.