Queer|Art is excited to announce the winner of the 2023 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant, Lorena Barrera Enciso. The New York-based filmmaker will receive a $7,000 cash grant, as well as studio visits with members of the judging panel in support of their creative and professional development.

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

The piece’s soundscape reconstructs the chic dinning room of the big city, a space which relies on the fragmentation of bodies to maintain efficiency. Meanwhile, interviews with co-workers and friends speak to the racial inequality in the service sector that is known but generally not made public. The stories and reflections the artist has been trusted with rely on the anonymity of the individuals and the fragmentation of the body, this time as a form of self-preservation. Manos introduces a series following immigrant communities resisting erasure. She writes, “there is reverence in the act of filming the people who shape the experience of culture and luxury, and there is dignity in voicing our experiences.”

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.