Queer and Decolonial Belonging in Eileen Olivieri’s Blue Ghosts

by Lucas Rene Ramos

Eileen Olivieri is an interdisciplinary artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico whose ancestry originates within the Italian diaspora. Olivieri’s work positions contemporary drawings and soundscapes in transhistorical, queer, and decolonial light: Through projections onto frescos and antiquated waterways, she seeks to uncover our genealogies, alternative kinships, and fragile connections to the ecological and mythological. Her immersive work demonstrates how both media and its mediation in site-specific contexts can recover lost heritages—her naturalistic plea to maintain a shared humanism against modernity’s pull towards extraction and alienation. 

Olivieri transforms the unfamiliar into the familiar, capturing the rhythmic fractals of identity, memory, and migration through biomorphic ink drawings and their transposition on the deteriorated spaces of frescoes and waterways. In tracing her Italian-American identity through these untouchable yet intimate ruins, Olivieri’s work-in-progress, blue ghosts, involves the queer and decolonial acts of retrieval. Imperviously empty corridors become an act of healing, where apertures for the mythological, and unknowable, reanimate their own world.

Just as fireflies reflect synchronized patterns passed down through generations, so too does Olivieri’s art mimic the sublime aspects of our nature. Olivieri reveals how the passage of intergenerational knowledge can never fully be recovered but, instead, takes on a life of its own that radiates bioluminescence. These installations, informed by the oil-based pentimenti Renaissance style, last only so long as they are projected. The microscopic tendrils become ghosts that linger in their exhibition sites. They serve as a source of momentary closure, soon rotating and extending out of focus beyond their original borders, absorbing the viewer in a moment of meditative wonder. In this way, the drawings themselves explore their own exhibition site as fully sovereign subjects. One may see languages, topographies, serpents, even respiring alveoli. 

Olivieri invites the audience into these forgotten and ancient landscapes, both sonic and bound to drawing, while also providing her installation with its own independence. As literary theorist Ann Cheng writes on racial identification and grief, there is a particular melancholy to these ghosts, whose fantasies only exist as a consequence of empire and its devastating effects on our ecological futurity and capacity for intimacy. Olivieri’s work suggests, what is sovereignty for genealogies long lost to assimilation and secularism? It is both a tragic and seductive act to long for the embrace of the collective: an act that recognizes the systems of power that create such grief, but that, in every iteration, materializes a means for us to tap into a pre-Christian rootedness to our shared sacred lands. Olivieri constellates this infinity of iterations in her praxis, retrieving and repossessing this intuitive knowledge through her own life trajectory. From the soundscapes of New Mexico to the olive groves of Abruzzo, Olivieri offers a space where cowbells and gentle breezes collide with ever-changing shapes as they implode, morph, and ask viewers to imagine otherwise.

-Lucas Rene Ramos, PhD Candidate in History, Columbia University