Ulysses Castellanos
El Salvador / Montreal
In 2020, Cecilia Araneda spoke with Ulysses Castellanos as part of a multi-year curatorial research project on Latin Canadian cinema. This is a brief extract of her research.
The artist Ulysses Castellanos spent his childhood surrounded by musicians, artists and writers (he is the grandson of concert pianist Angelita Garcia Peña of Radio Berlin fame, and WWII humanitarian Colonel Arturo Castellanos, honoured as one of the “Righteous Among The Nations” by Yad Vashem in 2010). Castellanos developed an interest in art, music and literature at an early age. This interest led to extensive studies in film, art history, musical composition, visual arts and acting, manifesting itself in the multiple disciplines that Ulysses pursues (curation, critical writing, performance art, painting, filmmaking, media art). In 2008, Ulysses completed the Telus Interactive Art and Entertainment Program at the Canadian Film Centre, where he worked in intersecting physical computing and interactive technology with kinetic sculptural elements. He is a member of the IKT International Curator’s Association (based in Osnabruck, Germany.)
Research Notes
Ulysses Castellanos was born in El Salvador. There was no opportunity for his family to have a home there due to a land appropriation regime by the state, so they became displaced persons, first making their was from rural El Salvador to the city of San Salvador, then to Honduras and then finally, in 1982, to Canada as refugees. In Canada, they settled in Pickering, Ontario, just east of Toronto. Castellanos started his art career in Toronto, working in a number of forms such as painting, music, theatre, and then eventually film – all rooted in performance forms.
When he was starting out in filmmaking, he had no access to any materials or cameras, and so he started working at remixing 16 mm and 8 mm found film reels into loops. In this way, he was able to build new semantics of meaning into the found footage images. Eventually, he was able to access a real production computer (versus old hand-me-downs) and soon began learning digital editing. He later began studying visual arts at the University of Toronto, then moved into film and music studies, but found the overall environment difficult for being inflexible to independent forms and more fluids ways of working.
He would soon make his way back to remixing found footage, editing it into new works that would become symphonic video performance works. He also found rooting in working with First Nations communities in collaborative filmmaking projects with youth in the communities. Collaboration would be his central way of working until just prior to the start of the pandemic, when things drastically changed in his life in Toronto and were exasperated by the pandemic itself. He moved to Taipei, Taiwan for an extended curatorial residency project with an Asian video group, and then more recently moved to Montreal, where he has been based for over a year.
Like many people who belong to displaced groups, Castellanos does not feel he belongs to any specific place or any specific culture, though he does feel the most connection to the street culture of San Salvador, where he was imprinted by the world of his parents, school time and the overall environment. However, he has never returned to El Salvador since his family was forced to leave, and so he does feel that frequency reducing as time passes.
As an artist, Castellanos sees his role as one to create bridges to connect people and cultures. He is especially interested in bringing communities together through performance and collaborative modes of working, although he is currently working in a more solitary manner in his new home in Montreal.
Filmography
Castellanos’ work and documentation is available for viewing on his Vimeo page.