The Brick <deep inhale>

Tamara Santibañez

The brick occupies a singular role in the radical political imagination: not only as an object and tool, but also as a site and moment of simultaneous disruption and generation. I propose the brick as a framework for oral history listening. In recognizing moments in narrators’ lives that both rupture and reorient the possibilities of being, I apply the metaphor of the brick and wall as a way to map agency, potentiality, and resistance while preserving narrators’ political knowledge. Visit: https://a-brick.world/essay.html

Santibanez_Tamara_The-Brick

Tamara Santibañez is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and tattooer living and working in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, New York). Tamara is author of Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work (Afterlife), as well as editor of the anthology Sexiness: Rituals, Revisions, and Reconstructions (Sang Bleu/Discipline Press). Santibañez has taught as a visual arts instructor at Rikers Island and with Rehabilitation Through the Arts at Bedford Hills Correctional, and has trained with the New York City Anti-Violence Project’s LGBTQIA2+ crisis hotline cohort. They have worked with the Women’s Prison Association and Resonance Tulsa to organize tattoo cover-up services for survivors of trafficking and women impacted by incarceration, and with Personal Ink to cover mastectomy scars for breast cancer survivors. They bring their experience in social justice activism to their creative and tattoo work, visualizing tattooing as a transformative practice, a space for healing, and as a vehicle for resistance to mechanisms of oppression.