Their work against the archive has led to a practice of counter surveillance that examines the politics of place, sight, and scarcity, in which found material is used as a means of imagining abundance in the face of widespread dispossession. Through the pursuit of alternative modes of documentation and cultural preservation in collaboration marginalized and oppressed communities, they seek forms and means of memory work that do not rely on imperial and colonial tools of capture and subjugation and instead rehearse collective liberation. Their work is highly informed by the resilience of organizing movements for abolition, self-determination, and liberation in Chicago, SE Michigan, and the broader Midwest.
Mira holds a Master of Art’s in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from the University of Michigan where they studied Ethnic Studies, Art History, and Ceramics.
They currently work with the following organizations: Walls Turned Sideways, The Digs, Patric McCoy Legacy Project/Diasporal Rhythms, Groundcover News, Michigan Student Power Alliance, and NON:Opera Arts & Humanities.
MISC WORK —
chronologically arranged
to the best of my ability
Laser engraved acrylic
Archives as Action, Archives as Discourse
April 2025
Dittmar Memorial Gallery
There is No Disappearing Act
November 3 - November 11, 2024 Sometimes Space
- It is unclear how many data centers there are in the city of Chicago. Some sources note 111, others note 136. Ubiquitous Archives is a contemplation on the rapidly accelerating accumulation of data and exploitation of resources that form the physical structures that sustain what Andy Clarno and others refer to as a “web of imperial policing. This web is fulfilled by the sharing of information, in the form of data, between different state, federal, and global agencies, from the Chicago Police Department to the FBI and the Israeli Defense Force, facilitated in part by data center and colocation providers. This piece draws on the loose formation of a data center, in which mass quantities of cloud data are housed in rows filling centers as large as 10.7 million square feet (Telecom, Inner Mongolia) and the most common data rack 42U houses 42 servers (the number of stacks before you), to evoke the innate physicality of data.
Enacting a practice of countersurveillance, Ubiquitous Archives focuses on two of the largest global data center and colocation providers with multiple locations in Chicago: Digital Realty and Equinix (who recently accepted a multi-million dollar contract from the Department of Homeland Security).