List Projects: Andrea Crespo

Andrea Crespo takes their own neurological embodiment as a point of inquiry as well as departure for a practice spanning video, drawing, and sculpture. Crespo connects their personal narratives with computational network culture and the medical sciences, as well as to institutional apparatuses of control and surveillance.

List Projects: Andrea Crespo features [intensifies] (2016), an hour long animated film that narrates the atypical development of Alan, a fictional young autistic male, from the first-person perspective. The film, inspired in part by the personal experiences of the artist, engages with autism as a simultaneously embodied and sociocultural entity. Alan is subjected to a range of tests and trials, manifest in terms associated with terror and alienation. He follows the circulation of autism discourse, which proliferates across satirical internet memes, and is constructed in terms of crisis and epidemic in mainstream media; all suffused with notions of degeneration and the specter of eugenics.

Accompanying the film are Crespo’s drawings that depict Alan’s machinic fantasies and experience of his world—one often stereotyped as cold, dead, and inhuman—in his images of transportation, warfare, and terror. Alan ultimately finds solace among the very machines which are often used as metaphors for the autistic body while simultaneously thinking of himself as little else but faulty hardware to be repaired.

Andrea Crespo (b. 1993, Miami) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

List Projects: Andrea Crespo is curated by Alise Upitis with Yuri Stone, MIT List Visual Arts Center