Camila Abbud
Camila Abbud is a Transfronteriza multidisciplinary artist and cultural organizer based in El Paso, Texas. This spring she will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Texas at El Paso, with a double concentration in Graphic Design and Painting and a Minor in Anthropology. She co-founded the Frontera Culture Curators Club, fostering opportunities for college students to engage in curatorial practice. Camila's commitment to museum studies was further exemplified through her participation in the Smithsonian Undergraduate Latino Museums Studies Program in Washington D.C. the Fall of 2022. As an organizer, Camila is deeply involved in grassroots initiatives that celebrate and uplift underrepresented voices. Thriving in collaborative organization, she co-founded Casita Queer in 2023: a series of intermittent independent exhibitions curated by her, open mics, screenings, and workshops created for underrepresented Queer artists from the border. Additionally, she co-organized the Gatos y Perros Uncopyrighted Zine Festival, facilitating a platform for zine artists and enthusiasts to showcase their work. Through her art and activism, Camila Abbud continues to be a driving force in promoting inclusivity, cultural exchange, and social change within her community and beyond. As a multimedia artist and an arts organizer, I seek to bridge connections and create conversations. I create work and spaces where connection and vulnerability can thrive, as a radical response to the radical impositions of struggle the folks of this borderland live and survive in. My creation is led by the framework that my work should serve as a mirror and a window to my experience in this place. I find beauty in the decay of the constant state of ambivalence that it means to have the privilege of being a transfronteriza. I seek to understand the coexisting realities of this complex place through my practice. I make paintings, video work, installations, and poetry. Currently, my painting practice has taken an approach towards mixed media as a means of exploring surfaces. I am interested in the interactions between infrastructure and people. In my experience, being a border crossing pedestrian feels like research in a literature of interactions. Decaying surfaces and the coincidental compositions of light in this cement desert are context clues to the lives that traverse them and I am but a witness. I intertwine these images of border crossings with scenes of my personal life: the people I love existing in this place. I use collage, plaster, acrylic paint, oil paint, and airbrush to recreate the textures of the infrastructure I traverse and depict its forms. Image transfer is an imperfect process I also use that most closely lends itself to the organic deterioration of public artwork or signage. I incorporate found cement blocks and objects as a way of bringing the actual contextual clues into a piece. I am currently experimenting with video art, textiles, and installation to explore the fragility as a response to the rigidness of our imposed systems. The complexities of the borderland are often illogical and deeply frustrating so I make art to try to understand them, but maybe, I never will, maybe I don’t have to, but for now questioning it will continue to drive my process.
