biography

Todd Lanier Lester is an artist and works on the family farm in Tennessee. Over two decades he launched a series of three rights-focused, participatory works situated between visual media and performance methodology: Multiyear timeframes designated to investigate social themes, while colorful project names offer an umbrella under which artists and non-artists alike create rhizomatic responses unfettered by conceptual end dates. For 10 years freeDimensional (2003-12) urges a sea change in the artist residency sector by practicing artist shelter and evacuation placements, convening networks and coalitions of expert practice, and publishing lessons learned in immigration and cultural policy fora. For five years Lanchonete.org (2013-18) occupies a small bar on a denigrated yet swiftly gentrifying street in the center of São Paulo as nucleus for artist and urbanist residencies, community meals, open courses, concerts, murals, public health campaigns and a radio station. For two years Luv ’til it Hurts (2018-20) engages poz artists and allies from Egypt, Germany, France, Brazil, USA, Mauritius, Colombia, Poland, Taiwan and beyond to understand their local HIV-related stigmas and challenges, yielding an evolving group exhibition and activist soapbox that can be invited to other communities.

More recently Todd began writing on artist methodology, both reconsidering his own organic trajectory and researching those of others from whom he draws inspiration and affirmation. Besides writing, a new project is in the works. FARM/SCHOOL plays with time differently, suggesting its arrival–rather than completion–within 10 years.

Todd became a sticker artist–a.k.a. el mejor karate–whilst living in São Paulo. This ad hoc process continues to clarify the pseudonym or decoy-tendency in naming his previous artworks.

[*This biography was written for participation in the Mirante Xique-Xique residency in Bahia, Brazil]

statement

1. I’m at the beginning of an archiving process that I’ll put online. Having called myself an artist for over 20 years and holding a series of long-duration projects (or thematic chapters of work) in place, I now seek to externalize some of my process and the trends I’ve witnessed. I suppose this is a mid-career retrospective of sorts; an assemblage in my own words.
2. I also need an artist statement for some upcoming opportunities.
3. It is easy to insert oneself into the art world. I’ve done this several times with different ideas, starting in earnest while living in Khartoum, Sudan when I launched freeDimenional. While beginning in the field of humanitarian assistance, I dabbled in film festivals, what I considered to be the residual spaces of Third Cinema across Africa. However my first timed performance (assemblage) on artist safety began with chance encounters learning from artists who had suffered oppression such as the street artist Afifi and the filmmaking family of Gadalla Gubara.
4. I reviewed the vocational space of the arts (history) laterally whilst implementing my first act, my first persona for 10 years, or that’s what I said. I admit, it was hard to stop after 10 years. But having instilled the notion of an endpoint indeed held me accountable for deploying the work of freeDimensional to other actors with purpose (I would soon disappear), and at times refraining from disappointment when it went in a different direction than I’d hoped for. I had already entered the second chapter, becoming the second persona, Lanchonete(.)org. Of course at times I felt I deserved more credit for the resulting apparatus of my social practice, however I was also developing my stance on what it would take to make truly social works–methodologically speaking–and one element would need to be a playful anonymity, a scattering of responsibility and ideas. That said, I always accepted the responsibility of documenting the work and crediting other artists. This would become tedious at times. I can say that my works have not often been exhibited, but at the same time that they were not intended to be curatorialized. This changes a bit by Act III, Luv ‘til it Hurts (or even el mejor karate), but I’ll save that for later.
5. freeDimensional used artist residency as a tool to achieve a desired end result of artists hosted and nurtured during personal danger. Obviously this had to be refined and practiced, and I ‘guessed’ that ten years would be enough to do that if I would totally immerse myself in the character I’d created. You can read more about this elsewhere. At the end of its ten-year run, I began slipping into the Lanchonete(.)org character, Act II. I took methodological learning from freeDimensional over to Lanchonete(.)org. I saw a growing space for artist safety, and yet distanced myself from its new institutions feeling they would encumber me if I asked for recompense in any manner that positioned their power over my knowledge. I would indeed enter a totally new field for the second act, one that would require starting from scratch other than these methods I’d tucked away in my handbag instinctually.
6. Over the ten-year course of freeDimensional, I’d visited São Paulo several times, culminating in a 2008 residency at Casa das Caldeiras during which the fD network could focus on growing its network regionally in Latin America, something we’d already done from Cairo for the Middle East. This worked and at the same time, I began sitting in lunch counters and formulating the conceptual lattice-work of a five-year project (platform and/or space) that used the common word ‘lanchonete’ and as such gathered people in comfortable semi-public spaces for (art) work on the right to the city. As I say, there were things that Lanchonete(.)org could borrow from freeDimensional even though it was to be site-specific. These ranged from general residency format to collective organizing insights when making a shell that others would help to fill with ideas and content. Just as freeDimensional had been, Lanchonete(.) would be a fake company as such albeit registered as a non-profit cultural association, a necessary step for receiving outside support.
7. freeDimensional asked pre-existing artist residencies to host artists and activists in danger, something that is now a common practice. Lanchonete(.)org focused originally on the center of São Paulo with only the name Lanchonete(.)org and a five-year timeframe looking at the right to the city. freeDimensional had Situationist International underpinnings, and the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre broke away from the Situationists; there are always theoretical questions and concepts built into my works; however not all participants are required to deal with them; I accept this responsibility in a similar way as I accept documentation and archiving after the fact. Like, perhaps I attempt to resolve the philosophical questions within my work by writing about them in slightly past tense; it is very hard for me to write about them whilst I am still performing them (within official timeframes).
8. With Lanchonete(.)org I also surveyed recent writing on social sculpture, relational aesthetics, social practice, site-specificity, public art, food practice and architecture. After a couple years of performing the platform of Lanchonete(.)org, I was able to buy a small lunch counter with and for the collective of artists working on the project; however I did this personally and not through the cultural association. I had learned methodologically what to control. The small bar came with its 35-year bartender, Tarcísio. He became one of the best partners I’ve ever had. He plays the triangle and has a group of guys who accompany him with various forms of Northeastern percussion. While I’ve never asked him if he’s an artist, he seems to get what I’m doing with the platform that hovers above his bar, Loja 3, Rua Paim 235.
9. At first we rented apartments in other buildings, notably the famous COPAN by Oscar Niemeyer that shares Modernist design similarities with Conjunto Santos Dumont. I didn’t feel I had enough collective permission at first to place foreigners into living situations in the Conjunto (above the bar) in the first years. I was more focused on the cultural events and interventions at the bar spilling into the private roadway of the compound. This ‘roadway without exit’ had been the site of frequent drug trade and gang activity over the past two decades. Northeasterners new to the city might be conscripted into the local gang as foot soldiers (vendors). The gang had a big base in one of the buildings until about 2006 or 2008. At the same time as Rua Paim began to gentrify (due to its amazing centrality) drug sales were shifting to online platforms rather than dark ‘bocas’ like the one this ‘road without exit’ had become. However the stigma of Treme Treme had affixed itself to the site, a home for upwards of 4000 people, majority Northeastern. Conjunto Santos Dumont, a Northeastern city-within-a-city had a PR problem. While Lanchonete(.)org did several other things, its focus would land on the Bar do Tarcísio, Loja 3, Rua Paim 235, Conjunto Santos Dumont. I would begin to plan an afterlife for the work of the project and an invitational approach to artists engaging the bar after the end of the five-year term. After the end of the project, I moved into the compound, and when artists asked to come visit I would encourage them to AirBnB themselves into residency, something that wasn’t feasible at the beginning of the work.
10. I contracted HIV while living in São Paulo. Just like Lanchonete(.)org to freeDimensional, Luv ‘til it Hurts–a two-year project on HIV + stigma–clung to Lanchonete(.)org for as long as possible before exerting itself as an entity. The Queer City cycle of Lanchonete(.)org had evoked a discussion on HIV through some of its programming in partnership with other artists such as EXPLODE! However I was only then coming out as Poz in public settings. At the same time I knew that this new situation would be processed through a methodological chapter (or Act III) in a series of chapters leading to something. It’s hard to say that LUV is closed in that it begat a new form or set of building blocks for encounter. A Polish artist Jakub Szczęsny developed an intimate series of expographical mobile containers for artist works and an Egyptian artist the LUV game, an interactive device for having a large conversation on HIV + Stigma. These two elements together comprise ‘Exquisite Corpse’ a show that can be invited to community centers, galleries, museums, health clinics and public spaces. This output arrived at about the same time as COVID and created a rupture in the progress of the small group of artists developing the idea. The two years served as an R&D period (for something new) as was intended.
11. I do not feel pressure to rush the deployment of Exquisite Corpse, nor is it my sole responsibility. Brad Walrond, Paula Nishijima, Jakub Szczęsny and Adham Bakry all played an important role in the R&D phase that forged this apparatus. I want it to be invited at leisure but also with urgency. I will likely live the rest of my life HIV+. I wish to live a long life and therefore have the time to deploy (and document) this small spaceship, fake company, exhibition and soapbox to wherever it is needed. I would say it is being prototyped with each day I live positively.
12. Living in NYC for a long time. São Paulo too. Cairo for a little bit. Dating back to a Mexico City visit around 2012 when el mejor karate presented himself to me in a rather scattalogical fashion, and then a 2019 Cairo visit and invitation by fellow graffiti artist Adham Bakry to be a bonified grafiteiro based on my fledgling interest … an alter ego came to life, blurted out in response to ‘And what would your name be?’ as my designer friend and revolutionary stencil-maker was drafting my first sticker. Edition 500. Some years on with a second edition by Brazilian artist, Gustavo Marcasse (1000 count) and 3rd by Polish artist, Jakub Szczęsny (2000+ count) using intentional and revisited symbology, EMK has begun to speak out in text formats, sometimes forgetting he is a simply a graffiti pseudonym. In my recent Res Artis conference, I referred to him as a ‘meta-brat’ who critiques all manner of things including the so-called art world in which he honed some of his skills.
13. My biography should be read in tandem with this artist statement. I am more succinct in saying what I am doing with el mejor karate. I also give a clue to how FARM/SCHOOL will use methods from the previous series of projects. If you click through to the original source there’s me wearing a t-shirt with Pagu (a literary pseudonym for the Brazilian writer Patrícia Rehder Galvão), reading Double by Otto Rank in which he compiles a survey of literary artists who played with their alter egos and pseudonyms in thinly-veiled feats of wordplay, encoding and storytelling. Clarice Lispector did this with Wordle-like precision as well as the European men Rank covers in his survey. Why did I intuitively name my projects with fake names, thereby creating confusion with and distance from the author? Why did I split and scatter in the service of an idea hugely present in my life in those moments, those chapters, those acts?
14. I presently take medication for both Bipolar Spectrum Disorder as well as Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder. As a budding queer mid-career artist from a traditional conservative–racist, sexist, classist and homophobic–space, my spycraft and subterfuge (dark arts) were developed out of necessity and survival well before I would know my work to be relatable to the arts. At times I question what I’ve made and if it indeed exists whether I would have had the mind to propose these various works outside my so-called neurodiversity. And if I am as crazy as some people say, do I compound this uncertainty by pretending to live in my so-called art world? I suppose that like HIV, I will remain with these questions for the remainder of my life. I accept them as a part of the assemblage if you will accept el mejor karate as (perhaps) the most pure of my alter egos. If you will accept that he can say things that I’ve helped him formulate but wasn’t able to say so clearly. But for sure he speaks for me, and I defend him. He/him pronouns, but I’m open to transitioning.
15. The ‘disorders’ I previously mentioned in #14 are constructed if not contrived. Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama lives in a mental health support facility. Similarly I’ve convened a panel of therapist and doctors to support my needs as an HIV+ Bipolar lad who is at times hyperactive and lacking focus. They understand that it is important to me that I function as an artist in this big ole (art) world. Should el mejor karate make a name for himself as an artist or writer, that’s cool too. However he’s primarily my double and caters to my bidding–externalizes ideas on mental health, locative narrative, literary arts intervention, graffiti, and general criticism–whilst ‘sticking’ around. You may not know if it’s him or me when we meet; we are somehow inseparable.
16. FARM/SCHOOL (or f/s in the infinity loop) is a truly nascent project that draws from years of working on artist residency initiatives. It is on the mountainside farm where I grew up. I am making it with my family. It will eventually focus on pedagogy and may see itself as a fake school as such. But a real farm. It is a homecoming/going-themed project that is yet to come and I’ll tell you all about it as it unfolds. I have no idea if, for example, el mejor karate is only an urban mask, nor do I know if he will intervene with FARM/SCHOOL.
17. Rather quietly I’ve been helping some Afghan refugees resettle in São Paulo. I wore my Palestinian scarf for my Res Artis presentation. I openly wear and practice my politics. I make worlds. These worlds intercept and overlap the art world at times, strategic times.
18. I’ve surely failed to credit some important figures in my evolution to a mid-career artist. They will come up in the project narratives I would imagine. I know them to also be world-makers regardless of whether they call themselves artists.
19. While I am not sure yet the relation between el mejor karate and FARM/SCHOOL, I can say that my graffiti work and my personal tattoos have a few relations in terms of symbology. I wear tattoos as protections and reminders, talisman. The Oroboro infinity loop in light green on the back of my neck was first on my 2nd edition sticker, just as the red heart logo from Luv ‘til it Hurts is on my left hand ring finger. The Oroboro surrounds letters ‘f’ and ‘s’ as a nascent logo for FARM/SCHOOL, a project yet to come. I should say however that FARM SKOOL already exists as a tattoo on my left leg where Brownie (the horse) would kick me leaving a horseshoe-shaped bruise. The letters are in typical São Paulo Pixaçao handwritten by the tattoo artist. This is the second time that I have had a font developed for me, the first being el mejor karate’s 1st edition (500 count) by Adham Bakry. So in some ways FARM/SCHOOL (f/s) already exists … on my left upper leg.
20. I am not so interested in the ‘material’. It is easier to have worlds within worlds when working with immaterial forms. And, importantly, specific ideas.

tll/emk

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