William Camargo: satis.FACTORY casa Residency, San José, Costa Rica
August 4 – September 1, 2025
No + Torres + Parques
San José on foot by William Camargo
A conversation between curator Erika Martin and Chicanx artist-in-residence William Camargo
Earlier this year, the independent arthouse satis.FACTORY held an Open Call for Latinx Visual-Based Artists living in Los Angeles, with the support of Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory. This collaboration encouraged artists to apply to our international artist-in-residence program (satis.FACTORY Casa), which offers a month-long stay for artistic production, experimentation, and research from our home in Barrio Escalante, San José, Costa Rica.
The Open Call brought together two women-led independent projects, one based in Costa Rica and the other in the United States. Both Hannah and I believe in the impact of cultural exchange as a space for personal and communal growth. We also provide opportunities for artists to share their knowledge and practices with the local artistic community in San José. In its first edition of the open call, Erika Hurigami (founder/director of CuratorLove) and Elena Kettelsen (Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1) were our esteemed jurors, and Chicano photographer William Camargo was selected.
Consequently, during August, Camargo is residing in and working from satis.FACTORY. In his work, William comments on the imperial/colonial history of photography through archival research and performative interventions that exist as photographs. For the residency, the artist has been familiarizing himself with the various forms of gentrification and displacement that occur in San José, as well as at the country’s coasts. He has also continued working on two ongoing photographic series: one focusing on the history, significance, and place of monuments, and a series of portraits where he invites individuals identifying with different forms of masculinity to participate in a photography session with him, encouraging people to be vulnerable and allow themselves to be photographed by and alongside a stranger. These processes will culminate in an Open Studio towards the end of the residency, where Camargo will present a selection of the photographs taken during the residency.
As the curator overseeing his process in satis.FACTORY, I engaged in a written exchange with William. We discussed his temporary stay in San José, his walking trips, his monument expedition, and how this experience will contribute to his artistic process.
We are excited to have a photographer in a context where this medium has dwindled over time, with little institutional representation and limited academic opportunities for photographic education, experimentation, or research.
Erik Martin: I appreciate your ability to convey political views through photographs that challenge or satirize the historical canon, as well as how you appropriate and recreate images and symbols that have historically excluded and racialized people of color. Through performative photos, you play with the stereotypes associated with terms such as Cholo or Chicanx, shedding light on various stigmas faced by immigrants and individuals from Latinx culture within the United States. You also comment on displacement, reviewing the impact of colonial history and new forms of colonization in Western societies. In your series “Origins and Displacements,” you directly confront and challenge viewers to consider how and where displacement occurs, and who it impacts. I interpret these photographs as an invitation to question and reflect on the experience of witnessing neighborhoods being gentrified by businesses or speculative real estate markets that transform these areas and displace those communities that established a secondary home and life in Los Angeles.
Since arriving in San José, you have spent a lot of your time exploring the city on foot. What areas or aspects of what can feel like a fragmented city have you found most interesting or inspiring?
William Camargo: It has been invigorating walking around San Jose. I have made it a daily habit to try to walk over ten thousand steps daily. Being how Southern California in many times is often unwalkable, San Jose does seem more walkable than So Cal, with its green landscape all over the city. I have noticed signs or graffiti that say "No + Torres + Parques" or recently, in today's walk, Aug 15, I saw an area fenced off and the fence was tagged No + Torres, in an area that might be a skyscraper. The graffiti says no more towers, more parks, or simply no more towers. It might be that towers or skyscrapers seem to be an avenue of gentrification in San Jose; it also, I think, coincides with the landscape in Southern California and Los Angeles. I remember this big tower that is empty, where a lot of graffiti was done, and it showed how there is housing, but housing for whom? I always think that cities around the world have this universal issue of gentrification; different cities of course, have different ways in how gentrification manifests. I wish the slogan I found here about having more parks would manifest in southern california, where parks in particular poor neighborhoods or green areas nor nonexistent, i've enjoyed that aspect of San Jose, the green areas and the wanting of more green space.
Erika Martin: We have discussed the impact of gentrification in Costa Rica and identified the most affected areas, such as Papagayo, Las Catalinas, Nosara, and Santa Teresa in Guanacaste. These areas have been gradually taken over by wealthy foreigners, displacing its residents. Similarly, satis.FACTORY is situated in a neighborhood that faces social, economic, and environmental tensions caused by gentrification on a daily basis. The graffiti you observed reflects the social discontent towards the effects of contemporary capitalism on our country. This discomfort can be understood from your perspective in Southern California, and is also evident in the works of local artists like Andrés Murillo and Jose Alberto Hernández.
We have also explored the various ways in which gentrification manifests itself and how it is addressed in cities such as San José, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. We both share the view that gentrification is a new modern form of colonization. In both processes, one population is replaced or dominated by another with more power, whether economic, social, or ethnic. This shift alters the socio-economic landscape of an area, leading to the displacement of the most vulnerable or impoverished individuals. Based on your personal experience, how would you define this term? And in what ways do your photographs serve as a form of resistance against displacement?
William Camargo: When I think of gentrification, I think of a new population, a more desirable population that will be able to pay more for housing, and get rid of the lower-class people. Usually, as well, this new form of colonization that gets thrown around refers to the day the native population that was there initially gets replaced by others. In Southern California, it means the Mexican/American and Black population gets replaced by white young people who want a more authentic place to move after college. I do think that my work is a form of resistance against displacement. I hope that my photographs are used as tools against displacement or some sort of catalyst for change, or at least to have people stop and look at themselves and ask are they the gentrifier? If so, I hope it can have them think about their presence in a new, upcoming neighborhood that was once considered dangerous. I asked myself the same question, being a person with two degrees and teaching at the university level: how is my presence felt in the neighborhood I lived in while I was in Chicago?
Erika Martin: You will be in Costa Rica until September 1st, and on August 28th, we will conclude the residency with an Open Studio weekend. The purpose of this temporary exhibition is to share with the public what you have been working on during your time in satis.FACTORY. What images and subject matter will the public view that night? How do you perceive that this residency will contribute to your artistic process and development once you return home?
William Camargo: There will be a few things I will be showing from the last couple of weeks at the residency. Work that is about the colonial history of the camera, which depicts as the camera being one of the tools used to document colonialism in Africa and Latin America. A series of work on monuments, their colonial history but as well as ideas of monuments within ideas of gentrification. In a series that has developed in San Jose is self-portraits with strangers, where I invited men, or those who are masculine identified, meaning trans masc men as well, to take a self-portrait with me. Those portraits are a way to talk about ideas of the patriarchy and masculinity. The work that I have continued at the residency is work where I visit sites of construction of demolition that are potential sites of changing landscapes. These are tied to ideas of gentrification, where construction and demolition sites are possible sites of new development that are catalysts to gentrification in the neighborhoods.
This residency has been a great insight on how many things are interconnected globally, from gentrification to ways of looking at masculinity. It has inspired me to continue to look at these ideas in a more global way than before, and I will be continuing these projects back home.
