Grace Marta Latigo

Grace Latigo's project used humor as a subversive vehicle to strategically destabilize prevailing conditions. A resource that has been used too little by feminist and anti-racist workers, according to Latigo. With bitter-sweet humor, the artist addresses the contradictions of the migrant society-between rejection and desire, between overwork and ignorance. Caught in the permanent need to work multiple jobs, she creates a character of distinctive language and aesthetics. The fun guerrilla uses social media as an increasingly important way to disseminate new forms of protest, thus situating itself between realities and fiction. This has resulted in a series of video performances for Youtube, alongside live stand-up performances at diverse and migration-marked venues in Vienna.

Grace Marta Latigo, born in Slovakia, father from Uganda, is a freelance artist in Vienna. Her family left Slovakia in 1981, since then she has been active in the fields of literature, painting, acting and immigration issues. From 1992 Grace Latigo lived in illegality for seven years without a visa due to a technicality, which forced her to deepen her artistic skills. With her readings and performances she has already appeared almost everywhere in Austria and in parts of Germany and Switzerland. In 1998 she participated in the play "Im Bauch der großen Grenzen" (In the belly of the great borders), which was awarded the intercultural prize of Upper Austria. She has participated in various social and cultural education projects in the field of migration and anti-racism. The fusion of her two core areas, art and human rights activism, earned her the literature prize "Writing between Cultures" from Edition Exil in 2002. In 2009, her first prose poetry volume " Meine Worte" was published. In 2012, the anthology "Rot-Weiß-Rot wir erzählen" (Red-White-Red We Tell) was published, with seven stories by people who came to Austria for various reasons and stayed here.