Irasema Fernández

Irasema Fernández (born in México in 1990) is a writer, visual artist, and activist.

As an intermedia artist, Irasema works at the intersection of writing and visual arts, exploring the interplay between word and object. Her work probes the duality of the personal and the collective, the internal and the external, the private and the public.

Irasema writes mostly diaries, lists, and essays. Her project Mobile Narratives is a series that explores the aforementioned intersection between writing and visual arts through handwritten strips of paper. Her interest lies in placing writing in public spaces, distancing it from the screen and the book. Additionally, she uses onion skin paper to transcribe fragments of her diaries, highlighting the fragility of intimacy and the impossibility of complete readability once exposed.

At the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Irasema is developing the project Even if they are not legible, all secrets have transparencies, which consists of a series of paper installations and the curation of an archive of secrets. In this project, she investigates the concept of the secret, traditionally used as a tool of control and power, but also as an act of freedom and self-determination. Irasema plans to continue collecting secrets in the coming years, with the intention of making them accessible to the public.

She conducts a series of street interventions to invite debate on gender violence, sexual abuse, police abuse, machismo, and beauty standards imposed on non-hegemonic bodies. She was invited by the Hay Festival Querétaro (2020) to give a Master Class on how urban art and street protest have been key to political imagination, community creation, and dialogue with people.

In collaboration with other activists, she received the Rapid Response Fund from the Avina Americas Foundation (2021) Against Institutional Machista Violence to demand information, prevention, and reparation for sexual crimes committed by police officers against women, trans, and non-binary people. Her current project, The Macedonian Machine: Learning From Bots, is a series of oil paintings that imitate images generated from text prompts related to police violence and state crimes in Mexico during the last sixty years using Artificial Intelligence programs (i.e., Dall-E, Midjourney, and NightCafeStudio).

She has been awarded a fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2024) in writing and visual arts, and in Novel Writing (2021) and Short Story Writing (2018) from the Mexican National Foundation for Culture and the Arts. She is the author of Qué belleza (What a Beauty) and the upcoming book Tu fantasma en mi cabeza (Your Ghost in My Head).