In her practice, Francisca Benítez uses video, photography, performance, installations and drawings to investigate relations between space, politics and language at the same time she links intimately to the places she lives and the communities with which she interacts. Benítez holds an MFA from Hunter College as well as an MA in architecture from the Universidad de Chile. Her work has exhibited at galleries, museums, biennials and has been acquired by numerous institutional collections. Standout solo shows include Direct Action at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture, in 2023; 2022’s Riego at Die ecke in Santiago; and New/Now at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, from 2017 to 2018. Her participation at collective exhibitions includes In Support at New York’s The Kitchen from 2021 to 2022 and Uprisings at Jeu de Paume in Paris from 2016 to 2017; among others. Benítez sings alto in Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir, an anti-capitalist gospel, performance and direct-action group based in New York, where she has lived since 1998.

Estudios de rimas por las formas de la mano, 2024
42 modified photographs
Risograph print, edits in graphite

In collaboration with the Centro de Educación Especial para Sordos y Lengua de Señas Mexicana A.C.–CESLSM (Special Education Center for the Deaf and Mexican Sign Language Association)

In voiceless poetry, rhymes are not determined by the sounds at the ends of words, but by the repeating shapes that hands make at the start of words. Each of the photographs shows common hand shapes in different sign languages, alongside interventions made by children as part of a deaf poetry workshop in collaboration with the Centro de Educación Especial para Sordos y Lengua de Señas Mexicana (Special Education Center for the Deaf and Mexican Sign Language Association of León). The words written on the images rhyme in Mexican Sign Language by using the same hand shapes in different positions and movements.

Décimas telúricas, 2010
Video (color, sound)
2 min. 24 sec.
Chilean Sign Language interpretation by Pamela Montero

Pichingal está temblando
bajo la luna plateada
la paz con la que soñaba
se me estaría acabando
de la cama voy saltando
corriendo sobre el rocío
temiendo más por los míos
que aún están allá adentro
por qué correrán tan lento?
en la tierra hoy no confío

Y se ha largado con furia
el suelo da latigazos
mi alma a cada zarpazo
se contrae sin lujuria
y se adentra en la penuria
que esto va significando
mi madre me está abrazando
mi padre viene corriendo
y juntos vamos sintiendo
que el mundo se está acabando

Pachamama enrarecida
hoy día te desconozco
me tratas como un vil mosco
sacudiendo tus entrañas
y las tierras aledañas
se van llenando de grietas
hasta las aguas más quietas
se vuelven ya un maremoto
somos un paisaje roto
el corazón se me aprieta

Cuando el rugido se calla
Levantamos campamento
y dónde fue el epicentro
va preguntando mi hermana
a las cinco ‘e la mañana
radio empieza transmisión
diciendo que en Concepción
‘tá la madre del cordero
el centro del hervidero
que azota en esta ocasión

Fue peor qu’el 85
mi abuela lo corrobora
la ciencia dice que ahora
las placas dieron más brincos
y con harto más ahínco
Llora mi tierra Maulina
del Bío-bío vecina
este día desolado
del adobe derrumbado
qu’en la penumbra asesina.

Has dado al mundo tus canciones, 2018
Poem with hand shapes for 1 through 10 in ASL
Video (color, no sound)
1 min. 51 seg.
Diagram on paper: transcription in SignWriting, translation in English and Spanish
Digital inkjet printing with long-lasting pigment on acid-free paper

In this video, Francisca Benítez recites a poem she authored in American Sign Language (ASL), with a lithograph as its starting point. In I Have Given the World My Songs (1947), Elizabeth Catlett referred to the struggle for Black liberation and the role of artists within the movement. For this poem, Benítez uses hand shapes, organized in a sequence from one to ten, representing the craft of deaf poetry as well as the “tenth” verse style in the Latin American poetic tradition. 

The video is accompanied by a paper diagram containing the transcription of the poem created in SignWriting, a sign system for movement notation, and sign languages created by Valerie Sutton in 1974, as well as translations into English and Spanish. This poetic piece arose from a collaboration with Douglas Ridloff on a performance at the Whitney Museum in 2018.