Jorge Lozano
Colombia / Toronto
In 2019, Cecilia Araneda spoke with Jorge Lozano as part of a multi-year curatorial research project on Latin Canadian cinema. This is a brief extract of her research.
Jorge Lozano is a Toronto-based immigrant artist and filmmaker born in Colombia. He has been painting and filming, and making video, sound, performance and installation works since he came to Canada in 1971. He has made over 150 movies — works that live not in-between, but within cultures. His work is a reflection of his personal commitment to epistemological disobedience and the investigation of different ways of thinking, feeling and doing. Lozano’s fiction shorts have been screened at TIFF and Sundance, and internationally at many festivals, museums and galleries. He initiated the Crossing Borders Film Festival, the aluCine Toronto Latin Media Festival and converSalon in collaboration with Alexandra Gelis. Jorge is currently working on several feature-length deliriums, architectural installations and film fetish short forms. | jorgelozano.ca
Research Notes
Jorge Lozano was born in Colombia and came to Canada in 1971 in his twenties to study at the University of Toronto. Like many of his Latin American filmmaker counterparts who immigrated to Canada after pursuing studies here, Lozano had sought to re-invent his life. He spent his early days on Toronto Island and, there, started in photography, Super 8 filmmaking, writing fiction and engaging in fragments of other art forms. Lozano very quickly understood he wanted to become a filmmaker, even though he could not see himself represented in the form. And so he commenced a working process that he has continued to this day, focused on documenting the life before him, challenging himself to capture a video diary each day. In this way, Lozano became a self-taught filmmaker.
Through his art practice, Lozano documents his existence: “que existo.” His work is also a reaction against formalist cannons in film, among them Anglo-Canada’s rigid experimental film milieu. In this manner, Lozano evokes Latin American literary traditions that emerged on the continent in the 1960s as a reaction against European traditions – among them the Anti-Poetry of Nicanor Parra, who was known for his prolific volume and his intention to react against the cannon. Lozano, in fact, does not consider himself to be a filmmaker, but rather to be specifically a poet.
Lozano is also a community builder within the Toronto Latin media arts sector, having served as a founder of both the Alucine Latin Film + Media Arts Festival and the ConverSalon artist talk series, both based in the city. He was a recipient of a national Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2020.
Many of Lozano’s works are available for viewing on his Vimeo site.