Project Luz is a nomadic space to share, learn, and experiment using photography as a tool of empowerment for immigrant communities. Project Luz partners with community groups and organizations to facilitate encounters where participants learn and co-create images inspired by identity and life stories. At Project Luz, workshop participants explore their experience of the city, and present stories from their individual migrant perspectives.

Workers are engaged in art making and storytelling strategies under El Worker’s Studio project for several months. In these encounters, facilitated through artist Sol Aramendi, immigrant workers learn photography and produce new work. They share their life stories of resilience and immigration, and how their peers empower them to succeed. They discuss the value of their work and photograph their daily routine.

Encouraging new immigrants to lead through art, Sol Aramendi works on socially engaged art collaborations that continue to be a part of an evolving social sculpture between labor, immigration, and art.

Seventeen years ago, she moved from Argentina to the United States and founded Project Luz. The heart of the work consists of facilitating a series of forums called The Workers Studio, where community members can use their own imagination and skills to come up with solutions, responses, and actions.

For this project, I built on my close ties with the workers of the New York City day-laborer community organizations, which have been the backbone of my professional experience, and deeply embedded in my personal artistic practice. As a facilitator, I use art strategies and the tools from my experience of community organizing in the labor movement. I accompany my work with reflections on participatory action research, and include pedagogical strategies from my work as a teacher.

Our projects are forums to build creative, social spaces through dialogue and cross-pollination. I have enabled the engagement of innumerable immigrant workers to discuss their issues in a social and creative space.

ABOUT PROJECT LUZ
Project Luz is a nomadic space to share, learn, and experiment using photography and art as a tool of empowerment for immigrant communities.