Queue Magazine is pleased to present an exclusive live interview hosted by Q Mag founder and independent curator Catherine Camargo with Tunnel Projects founder and  artist Luna Palazzolo Daboul at Bakehouse Art Complex. The discussion will explore Luna Palazzolo's multidisciplinary artwork and her contributions to the emerging Miami art scene through her project space/artist studios in Little Havana, FL, Tunnel Projects. The audience will also have the opportunity to ask Luna questions about her practice. This is the first live session of Queue Magazine's intimate interviews with Miami-based artists, and we look forward to seeing you there.

Luna Palazozolo-Daboul
Born in Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina, to middle eastern and Italian parents,  Luna Palazzolo is a multidisciplinary artist who later relocated to Miami at the age of 20. While actively contributing to the local art community, they have exhibited their works in various locations, including Buenos Aires, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and the United States.Luna's interests in psychology, which they studied at Kennedy University in Buenos Aires, and materiality, which they frequently explore through their profession in restoration and fabrication, heavily influence their self-taught artistic practice. Their work is a reflection of their surroundings and can be described as iconoclastic, as they often tackle themes of resistance, empowerment, and a critical outlook on the growing technocratic society. Luna is also the Co-founder of the artist-led initiative aimed to produce and manage exhibiting opportunities beyond the institutional realm,Tunnel Projects. Tunnel is a 250 square ft underground project space/artist studios located at El Capiro,a shopping plaza from the 1980s in Little Havana. 
JULY 23RD 2024,
QUEUE X BAKEHOUSE ART COMPLEX (Miami) PRESENTS: In Conversation: Catherine Camargo and Luna 
Palazzolo Daboul

 

              x
Catherine Mary Camargo (b. 1998, Miami, FL is an independent curator, writer, and artist based in Miami, with Haitian and British heritage. She is currently the Curatorial Assistant at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Director of Queue Magazine/Q Gallery, a nomadic gallery and online magazine initiative. Her curatorial and editorial work explores systemic barriers and vulnerable themes through a lens of minimalist or unconventional aesthetic beauty. Previously, she served as Assistant to the Collector & Chief Curator at the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in Wynwood, Miami. Her selected writings include "Anselm Kiefer at the Margulies Collection," Miami Native Magazine, 2024, several self-published interviews with local Miami artists, and a self-published elegy and photography book, QUIET PETAL 1 (2021). Camargo has moderated and spoken on local panels such as In Conversation: Luna Palazzolo-Daboul & Catherine Camargo at Bakehouse Art Complex, Baker Hall Gallery x Dimensions Variable, YoungArts. In Collaboration with Curator Katherine Hinds, Camargo initiated Art & Poetry: a trauma informed workshop at the Miami Lotus Women’s shelter in 2022. Her artwork and poetry have been exhibited at venues including Baker Hall Gallery, Red Bridge Studios, YoungArts, NYU Tisch Gallery, Reimagining Interiority (curated by Dr. Deborah Willis & Dr. Joan Morgan), C. Grimaldis Gallery, and the Reginald Lewis Museum in Baltimore.






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TALK Transxribed: 




CC: Hi everyone! Thank you guys for coming, I'm excited. And Luna's awesome, so this will be good. I guess I'll introduce myself, even though I feel like I recognize most people, which warms my heart, but I'm Catherine Camargo. I'm a writer, artist (sort of), and a curator. I like researching other artists. So I've been doing this project where I've been interviewing a few Florida artists this last year. I figured Luna is popping off so much recently that she deserves a live one…..not that the other artists I did aren't popping off and also deserve that! I just thought it would be special to get everyone together

LPD: Sweet. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. It's nerve-wracking, but super sweet as well. So I'm glad to talk to you guys.

CC:

I have everything that I wrote down, but some of these questions are so wordy that I might make it shorter for this, we'll see. I’ll start off by introducing Luna a little bit. I found this stuff on your website so I don't know how accurate it is, so just tell me if it's not. You've been in Miami since you were 20 and you've already achieved so much with Tunnel Projects, which a lot of you in this room have been exhibited in or have heard about. Tunnel Projects is an exhibition and studio space for artists, and you also are an actively practicing artist yourself. You do so many things at once. You also curate. So I just have so many questions for you about how you balance it all, essentially.
LPD: I think that the necessity of being perfect and being able to manage time as a look out to perfection is what keeps me going. I think behind it there is a great amount of anxiety and fear to spend time not doing anything. I think the awareness of death that I have keeps me going through the fire. That's it.
CC: That's pretty. You're so poetic.
I got to have a quick studio visit with you a few months ago and you told me an interesting story about how you were first influenced into making art and just the process of making in general–at a factory where your mother worked in Argentina. Can you tell that story again?

LPD:
Sure. My parents, growing up when I was in Argentina, had a factory that specialized in making denim products. So jeans, jackets, it was the 90s, so there was a lot of denim. They would produce the clothing in their factory, so I spent a lot of time there, maybe sleeping between the rolls of fabric under the cutting tables, and as my life progressed, my parents would have me do thread cutting, placing buttons, etc. I would have access to these pieces of fabric and all these things. I had an obsession with making pillows from when I was like five to seven. I think it was the easiest thing for me to do, but looking back at it, I see it reflected in my work these days. Then, as I grew up, there were other modifications of what they did, being close to art. Like photo shoots, models, a certain approach to beauty that goes hand in hand with making, you know?



CC:  Yeah, I mean …..I wish I had a screen here so I could show you guys her pillow works for anybody who hasn't seen them. because your pillows are in so many of your sculptures and I remember seeing it in person and being so impressed. They are so beautiful, like you can tell you have that experience so it's funny to hear that. How do you feel your practice has evolved overall since you moved to Miami?


LPD:
When I was growing up, though I had artistic inclinations and the inclinations to just make things–It wasn't an option for my parents to let me be an artist. So I very briefly attended law school. I would have been a great lawyer. But then when I moved to Miami, I wasn't ready for being an artist. I was an immigrant, I was an illegal immigrant, as a matter of fact. And so I had to work, I had to figure out my legal situation, and then there's something about the United States, that if you come from a third world country, if you don't face yourself, it will eat you alive. It sort of dragged me in with it. You know, there's so many examples that speak about capitalism and the way Americans live that are reflected in the decisions that I made until fairly recently, maybe 2019, 2020…This time was maybe a pivoting point where I stepped back from my work and I looked at it and I decided that what I was making wasn't anything else but a reflection of my necessity to make, like physical energy and labor, which is still a big part of my work. 
Though it was simultaneous with trying to leave jobs which were arelationship of dependence. So it wasn't just about stopping doing something that I didn't want to do, but also doing what I wanted to do in the way that I wanted it to be seen. And so for me personally, it was to stop thinking about money. The moment that I stopped relating my work to money is when I started to make things that I could love and be proud of and take them and go from there.

CC:Thank you. Yeah, I feel like that's really relatable to probably a lot of people here, in the arts in general. From a curatorial perspective, I'm personally really drawn to works that contrast really poetic and gentle conceptual ideas with rough, non-traditional art-making materials, like cement, but also flower petals and pillows, which are soft and dainty and beautiful. I'm wondering if you see any conceptual similarities between these materials, and if so, what that visual contradiction between the both mean to you.

LPD:
Well, in the sense of what it means to me; I think that anyone that is a close person of mine, anyone who has known me for a while can tell that most of the works are self-referential. I feel a little hard and a little soft most of the time.So, these contrasting elements that I use tend to be a response to systems that we tend to use– in which they have to be perfectly balanced. Either you have to be feminine and masculine in equal amounts to have the perfect formula, or you need to be a little bit of a bitch, but a little bit kind as well, you know, to kind of comfort us. So, it comes out as just simply that, in words, but in reality, I feel like most of humanity runs by these parameters, in which we try to position ourselves in places, I think that art in the future is not going to be about that so much. I mean, there's a lot of work that is about identity and it's beautiful and it's kind of inevitable….. but it happens here in Miami, this place is the place for that, but what happens when identity is not a safe space for me?

The idea of just placing me in one place is terrifying, so, using two things that are very far apart is my way of saying even though there's a norm in place, I'm going to do whatever I want.
Plus, I think it also makes it so that everybody on every spectrum of like femininity and masculinity,  whatever they consider themselves as, can relate to symbols within my art or have their own interpretations of it.I don't think I, as an artist, like to explain my work in general lines– It's right there for people to see. It's for people to think whatever you want out of it. You know, there's no need to really go in depth about it.

This is just my take on my own work, but I think I might be too close to the conflict.

CC:

In 2023, you won a Wave-Maker grant for your Text-a-poem project, an innovative SMS service that automates the delivery of poetry via code. You declared that you were inspired by the iconic Dial-A-Poem service established by the late poet, artist, and activist John Giorno in 1968. With this grant, participants could text the word ‘POEM’ to a specific number and receive an automated poem for a month. I received a few poems myself and they were somewhat strange yet beautiful. Though I find it interesting that when I was last at your studio, you mentioned you don't consider yourself a poet. Considering the success of this project, the text often found in your sculptures, and even the list of influences you emailed me for this interview, which is full of poets, I find this surprising. I consider you a poet. Can you discuss why you don't consider yourself one?


LPD:
These were not really poems, they are kind of like copy-paste’s made from cutting books and rearranging the words and that's why they look a little bit cryptic. It's sort of like, in a way, computer generated poetry because the manuals that I took the words from are TV design manuals that are obsolete. Nobody uses them for anything anymore when you can go on YouTube and get a tutorial with motion images and get it done way faster. But I still wanted to use the boost for something else because attachments to objects are inevitable. This work is highly referential to somebody else's work–John Giorno dial-a-poem service, which is what was referenced with the work. With dial-a-poem, you could pick up a phone and dial the number, and then one of the big generation poets would recite a poem for you. So in my efforts to kind of mimic these in our times in technology, I took these books that are meant for technology and touched them, and as I touch I turn them into something and then I return them to technology through the messaging system. So it's kind of like a ping pong of humanity and technology that goes back and forth.

CC:

and Dial-a-Poem by John Giorno was also done in 1968, so I think this updated version of that is really interesting, too.

LPD:

Ha what would he think?

CC:

I think he would say you're a poet.

LPD:
 I don't knowww.

CC:

You define your work as “an analysis and protest– of the parameters that humanity imposes upon itself.” When spending time with your work, I can feel this analysis and protest. There is a gentle yet analytical and almost medical layout of material yet their material arrangement is so ambiguous and nonsensical in the first place that it feels like a kind of protest. Your work evokes a quiet argument, or boundary of some kind. Does this read of your work resonate at all? Can you talk about this protest and the human parameters you mention?

LPD:
Yeah, definitely. So in the research of developing my work, I discovered that I was highly interested in these parameters that we put upon ourselves, like beauty, sometimes its values, objects, it translates into language and morality, you know? So, all these things that we strive to abide by that are just made up rules…. I think just by observing and responding to them, naturally, that's the process. I mean, being able to make art these days, is a protest upon itself.

Using these items which I tend to relate them as symbology or conductors for these parameters, is something that I try to stick to. And my work has a lot of aesthetic jumps because I like using different materials and I like using these materials especially when I don't know how to use them. In that way I’m using them in an unorthodox way. So there's certain connecting threads that I try to keep throughout them, which are these parameters, simply because I'm just a way-biased person.

CC: 

Yeah, I think that's super true what you said too, that making art these days is a protest in itself and I think even more so that's a fact when you consider the background of someone like you or anyone who is not born with a silver spoon in their mouth and can simply decide to be a collector, decide to be an artist, and have a better chance at success. Though, I feel like true artists aren't even really doing it for success–like you.

You're just doing it because you need to. It's an inherent thing that you have to do in order to survive.

I've noticed that you reference the absence of the body in your work rather than using literal suggestions of the figure, with the exception of your recent piece: mother/home/country, which includes the legs of what appear to be baby dolls. For example, in your piece; Santa Rita, 2024, the pillow is longer than average, suggesting a body pillow. How would you describe your relationship with referencing the body, or the lack of it, in your pieces?
LPD:
The lack of approach to the body is something that is born from my own personal issues with body image and the comfort that I feel in my physical form. The work with the legs and the arms, it's referential of the doll, but it's more about fragmentation and replication and what if identity lies behind that. For things like that pillow, those pillows are actually my great grandmother's pillows. I used to sleep on those pillows with her. We used to share one pillow and I thought that was so beautiful…. sorry, I might cry. I'm sorry.

So I thought about the pillow as a place to rest and share, like a dream but not in the sense of having fantasies when you go to bed but as a look towards the future, as a sort of planification. So, the body isn't there but the mind is there for sure.

CC:

This is a bit of a follow-up question. In your series of 12 works titled: Futuro Perfecto, 2024, you refer to some materials used as “symbolic objects” such as flies, nails, hooks, barbed wire, airtags, flowers, and religious paraphernalia. What makes these objects symbolic for you? How do you decide the meaning assigned to these materials individually?

LPD: So, for this work, I made the first one with a series of bowls that are casted, it's resin cast on bowls and they have some objects inside. And the objects I see, for example, the air tags to me are a symbol of location and the importance that location has for everyone these days. It seems as if the media goes on, location and placement is kind of more relevant these days, the more we grow. There's a barbed wire that to me is more like the limitations and borders. There's glue on nails that to me they stand for femininity. Then there's a collection of flies that I hunted and killed over a year and a half with my bare hands. And you couldn't damage the flies, because if you damage them, you can't archive them. But to me, the process of catching something and putting it to rest forever, was an exercise in cruelty. It's still very human, you know? I am not afraid of certain parts of myself, but because I don't wanna be scared of certain parts, I tend to put myself through exposure therapy so what it's like to do the first time it's way way easier to do the next three things.

CC: 

How did you capture them?
LPD: Some days I would hit them with a rake. And sometimes I would just punch them or knock them and catch them still alive….

CC: 

I don't judge you right now because I love when I can kill a fly. Like I don't know if it's the Caribbean in me or something but it’s satisfying.
LPD:    Yea, you’ve got to be real quick.

CC: 

Do your parents understand your art?

LPD: My parents don't understand my art. They don't understand me. They tried to get me to go to law school. But as the years progressed I could say more of what I really wanted to do and they came to respect it I think, and support it. After a good deal of proving myself, for sure.

CC: 

Did you want to go to law school at all, or was that totally them?
LPD:  
I think that my wanting to go was more trying to please my parents. Argentina is a highly conservative country. The opportunities for artists, they're not the same as we have over here. We are privileged to have all of what we have. I talked to my friends over there, and the type of opportunity has made the community so competitive that I probably wouldn't have the chance to do what I'm doing if I was over there. It would probably be easier to be a lawyer, but I'm not.

CC: 

 Do you hope to/ or have you already shown your work professionally at home?

LPD: I haven't. I am in Argentina, what is called vendepatria—or the expatriate, I think it’s called in English—and it comes from when you make a decision, as an older person, to leave your country. There’s a big judgment around why you would leave.And so, for a while, I didn’t belong here, but I really didn’t belong there either. One of my goals is to establish myself over there, but have more of a perceptual connection with my country, because some of my work, to me, is a bridge to the context where I grew up. So I have a relationship to the country—I have a relationship to where I was born. But where I was born doesn’t necessarily mean I have a relationship with them.

CC: 

No, I don't think that's true. I feel like, I don't know, your home needs you. It'll be easy, that needs to happen soon.

LPD:  I think you don't need anybody.

CC: 

Fair. You've mentioned that you've been crafting poems in a collage-like manner, employing a copy-paste approach using only reference manuals for 3D design as your source material. In your own words, you've described the process as “It's been a back-and-forth, a ping-pong game of returning humanity to now obsolete objects. Now, I want to somehow give them back to technology, and return to them their existing purpose.” What kind of 3D design do you work with? And how can you further articulate this process of returning these obsolete objects to humanity?

LPD:
 I don't work with 3D design. I actually inherited these books from an artist named Ed Levine. He was a very wealthy person and had many copies of many things. When he passed away, I was in charge of documenting some of his work and going through his archives—and then later on, going through his belongings. It was such an obsessive place, and such a great haul. There were things everywhere—it was great. There were like 40 or 50 books, and some of them were repeated. There were 10 books on Maya, 10 books on everything. I couldn’t just get rid of them. But also, they had a purpose for Ed. And in going through his work, I created a relationship with him, even though he was obviously deceased at this point. But it sort of spiraled into manifesting a physical form from these months of working with his things, you know? With my take, of course, I did things completely differently. Yeah, it was like an archive in a way—but just of what was important to me.Going through his work, I created a relationship with him, even though he was obviously deceased at this point. But it sort of spiraled into manifesting in a physical form these months of work that I had with his face, you know? With my take, of course, and did things completely differently. Yeah, it was like an archive in a way, but just of what was important to you.

CC: 

How do you balance running Tunnel Projects and creating your own work? Does running it provide any advantages to your artistic practice?
And could you also give everyone a quick rundown of what Tunnel even is—a little better than I did?


LPD:

So,Tunnel is a little place in little Havana, and we have two verticals. One of them is the studios for artists—we're 11 artists taking part in the whole plaza. And the other vertical is exhibition spaces. We have a window, and we have a project room that’s about 200 square feet, I would say. Tunnel does many things internally, beyond just what people see in terms of the studios. There are so many other people besides me who do their part—we all care for everything together. We all have different types of skills, so we like to teach each other and help each other. So it works a little bit like a web of support, I would say. Within us, I guess we’d be a micro-community.

But then the project room is a little bit more personal to me. I like to think of it as a long artwork—it has a beginning and it has an end, like every artwork should have. The exhibitions we present are, in one way or another, close to my practice as well, but they always encourage the artist exhibiting to do whatever they want. There’s a strong focus on experimental work, works in progress, exhibitions that have sprouted from many talks or conversations between Tunnel and the artist. So it’s a cool space—it’s not that serious, you know? Like, it's serious in the sense that it's important, for sure, but it's a place to experiment. You wanna paint everything black? Somebody has done it. Right now we have an anonymous show, so it's an encouragement to the artists to do what they would be able to do in another physical space.

CC: 

Yea, I think that makes it serious. You just give everybody an opportunity to do something really good in there, regardless of what scale of success they are in their artistic careers. So I think that's really awesome.

LPD:

Thank you. Yeah, I think it's important, even between ourselves as artists, to help each other, provide those opportunities. Miami's such a new environment for everything that's going on, and it's up to us to do whatever we want to set those parameters for the future. I grew up in a place where you would go to someone's house to see artwork, you know? And you would congratulate them there anyway. There was no need for it to be an opening—well, there weren’t any galleries in my city, actually—so you would have to travel to the capital city. But to be honest, I really wanted to do it, and I wasn't thinking about what other people were doing, I was just thinking about what I wanted to do. Yeah, and we can balance as well—that’s good. I mean, my work is my work, always. Ever since I started, I’ve known that my priority is my work, because if I’m not where I want—whether it's spending time with my work or working on it, or maybe not working on it—then I won’t do Tunnel as happily as I would.But with that being said, there are situations where I have to work on something else, and the people at Tunnel have stepped up—with anything, with dealing with all the things that require you to put an exhibition together, bringing in artists, making sure that things are happening whether you're there or not.

CC: 
Yeah, I think something you just said reminded me of something a painting professor told me in college. I was a painting major, and I got to the point where I was like—I don’t really want to strictly paint anymore. Like, it's not the most important thing to me anymore. I want to curate and maybe sometimes be an artist and they were like, “Let’s say you get the opportunity to curate a show somewhere amazing. Does your work have to be in that group show?” And I was like, “No.” And they were like, “Okay, then you can do both.” But that’s hard for a lot of people: to be able to balance the two, and also be able to separate themselves from one practice at times and still excel in the other.
LPD:

Yeah, it's hard. But I always have a little time for more. If there’s something that I want to do, I’ll make time for it. And I sleep eight hours, so...

CC:Okay—how did you decide on the name Tunnel Projects?



LPD:

It wasn’t just one decision. I think that I would never do things just for one reason. But the physical space is literally a tunnel. And then my friend Anna suggested “The Tunnel,” and it made sense. One of my favorite books ever is The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato, which is one of the most important books I’ve ever read. I read it very young in my life, and it's one of those books that marked me. It talks about the past, and how every time, the past was better. It connected well with that sense of melancholy and the past that runs throughout my work. So with that, the suggestion from Anna, and the actual tunnel situation—it was like, what else am I really gonna think of? 


CC: 
Yeah, when I first heard the name, I assumed—well, I didn’t assume—but I was like, maybe it’s about the tunnels in Miami, like all that crazy stuff we’re always constructing. But that’s a whole different story lol.

Thank you Luna, I’m going to open up questions to the audience now. 

(If you’re still reading and are curious about the insightful questions asked by the audience–please please watch the second video above from 22 minutes in until the end.)












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