Queer|Art announces winner of the 2023 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant

Manos still by Barrera Enciso

LORENA BARRERA ENCISO HONORED AS WINNER

Queer|Art, New York City’s home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, is excited to announce the winner of the 2023 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant. The New York City-based filmmaker Lorena Barrera Enciso will receive a $7,000 cash grant, as well as studio visits with members of the adjudication panel to support her creative and professional development.

Barrera Enciso was selected among 149 applicants who applied for the Hammer Grant in its sixth year. The filmmaker will receive funding for a project currently titled Manos –– an experimental documentary short composed of interviews that document the daily routines of Latin-American immigrant workers in the service industry of New York City. 

The Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant is an annual grant awarded to self-identified lesbians for making visionary moving-image art. The grant is supported directly by funds provided by the estate of legendary lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019), and administered through Queer|Art by lesbians for lesbians, with a rotating panel of judges. This year’s judges included Taylor Aldridge and Nazli Dinçel. 

About Lorena Barrera Enciso, Winner

Lorena Barrera Enciso is a Mexican interdisciplinary artist. Her film work observes the inherent choreography of the body in motion and the sense of longing that is inarticulate and exists without spoken language. Through her experiences as a brown migrant body, she explores the fabrication of identity and invisible labor in the context of the United States. The tactile quality of her work yearns for intimacy and favors exposition methods closer to the warmth of community and alternative to the big screen. However, her work, like her, is a body of many homes. She is currently based in Queens, NY.

Barrera Enciso was awarded the Hammer Grant for her forthcoming film, Manos. Manos, is an experimental documentary short that sets out to illuminate the everyday routines of Latin American immigrants working in the service industry in New York City. The film is a composition of collaged sequences and fragments that underscore the invisible labor embedded in the service industry. Across Manos, Barrera Enciso incorporates a richly textured soundscape: the chic clink of glassware and a cacophony of banging metal pots and pans invoke the sounds of fine dining rooms across New York City, which as Barrera Enciso notes, rely on the fragmentation of bodies to maintain efficiency. Barrera Enciso includes interviews with her co-workers and mutual friends to speak to the racialization of service work throughout the film. To share these reflections, Barrera Enciso conceals the identities of her interviewees, protecting the anonymity of the immigrant communities that she documents as a form of self-preservation. 

“I feel so honored to be awarded this grant,” remarks Barrera Enciso. “Manos is a piece that has been in production since Fall 2021. While in the past, my process has been solitary, I believe the urgency of the subject requires specific skills which I do not have and could not fund on my own. This grant will allow me to bring the project to completion with the care and dignity it deserves.”

As 2023 Hammer Grant judge Nazli Dinçel notes, “Lorena’s proposal stood out to me in several ways fitting into Barbara’s vision and legacy as an experimental pioneer.” Dinçel “looks forward to seeing this analogue, experimental project that will center migrant workers in the service industry in NYC.”

In addition to Barrera Enciso, four other filmmakers were acknowledged as finalists for this year—Oreoluwa Akinyode, Brittany Nelson, Helen Peña, and Jazmin Jones. 

About Barbara Hammer

Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) began making films in the 1970s. She is most well-known for making the first explicit lesbian film in 1974, Dyketactics, and for her trilogy of documentary film essays on queer history: Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fictions (1995), and History Lessons (2000). Her cinema is multi-leveled and engages audiences viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change, often through an exploration of the materiality of the filmmaking process and its relationship to the body’s potential as subject, form, author, and screen. She has been honored with seven retrospectives, including a 2019 exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Previous retrospectives took place at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Tate Modern in London, Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Toronto International Film Festival, Kunsthalle Oslo in Norway, and The Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City. Her book, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life was published in 2010 by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York.

About Queer|Art

Queer|Art connects and empowers LGBTQ+ artists across generations and creative disciplines. Founded in 2009, we are an artist-led and community-centered organization—united by shared values of collective care, creative resilience, and the preservation and advancement of queer legacies and queer futures.

The devastating loss of a generation of artists to the ongoing AIDS pandemic has created a profound longing for cross-generational connections, mentorship, and community. Queer|Art serves as a ballast against this loss, seeking to highlight and address a continuing fundamental lack of both economic and institutional support for our community.

Ongoing programmatic initiatives include: our annual cornerstone program, the year-long Queer|Art|Mentorship and a wide array of awards, grants, and offerings that provide direct support to LGBTQ+ artists.

Website: www.queer-art.org
Instagram: @queerart