Cyanotype backdrop hanging to dry
Here Forever and Today (2025)
Social Practice, Participatory Workshop, Exhibition, and Community Archive
Here Forever and Today is a participatory art and archive project developed by Sol Diaz-Peña with queer and trans communities in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood and beyond. Conceived as a "reverse picture day", the project reclaims the familiar, regimented school photo ritual as a generative space for self-expression, agency, and collective care.
Developed during The Glitch Lab—a five-month fellowship exploring surveillance, youth governance, and educational technologies—Here Forever and Today poses critical alternatives to compulsory surveillance and institutional social control. Rather than enforcing a single mode of visibility, the project establishes conditions where participants autonomously choose how, when, and by whom they are seen, named, and archived.
"National Coming Out Day is rooted in reclaiming agency and deciding for ourselves how we are seen, named, and known... Queer communities have long been watched, categorized, or expected to fit into certain boxes. This project honors our parallel traditions of resistance in the pursuit of living truthfully, safely, and joyfully."
— Sol Diaz-Peña
Core Principles
The project reorganizes traditional relationships between the artist, the participant, and the institution by structuring participation around three core ethical commitments:
Optionality (Freedom of Movement & Engagement): Participants move con calma ("with ease") across making and reflection stations. There is no prescribed path: individuals can create wearable artifacts, observe from a distance, pose with friends, or leave without producing an image.
Return (Custody by Default): Countering institutional practices where participant data and imagery are immediately co-opted, Return ensures participants keep physical ownership of everything they create, In this case, their original instant photographs and artifacts made during the workshop.
Stewardship (Consensual Archiving): Contributing to the collective archive requires an explicit, secondary decision. Using a high-resolution scanner on-site, participants choose whether to donate a digital scan while retaining full copyright and physical ownership of their original work.
Workshop Program flier
The Workshop Experience
Held on National Coming Out Day at Houston’s Montrose Center, the workshop transformed the space into a joyful community workshop centered on three distinct stations:
Cyanotype & Fan Station: Participants created blue-and-white sun prints using transparency sheets and acrylic paint markers, and text and image graphics from the project, with the option to mount their prints onto handheld wooden fan frames.
Garment & Wearable Shield Station: Utilizing hand-printed textiles, denim, and button-makers, participants crafted wearable Statements, accessories, and "shields" designed to celebrate self-expression.
Reverse Picture Day Studio: Featuring instant cameras, a hand-printed cyanotype backdrop, and custom props, participants staged their own portraits individually or collaboratively with peers.
Selection of archive scans
Selection of archive scans
Collaborative Labor & Acknowledgments
Here Forever and Today relies on a network of care, relational trust, and collective labor. The project was facilitated alongside creative practitioners who supported participants across stations: liz (textiles and buttons), Marlene (cyanotype printing), and julia rossel & Riley Ansa (photography, scanning, and digital permissions).
Special thanks to archive contributors Amelia, Colibri Guerra + Gab Tiquet, Connor + Issac, Demarco Emons, Erika Mei Chua Holumn, Esther, Grey Saige, Hugo Regan, Jack Morillo + Fabian Cardenas, Jake Margolin, Julia Rossel, Julian, Leila, Liz, Loc Huynh, Magdalene McArthur, Marlene, Mason Sandefur + Chris Creamer, Mona + Gio, Morgan Herbas, Nancy Rios, Naomi Lemus, Paper Autumn, Riley Ansa, Rose, Ruben Ramires, Tammy, tyler bean, and Yano Hz.
Image by Izaac Constiniano
Image by Izaac Constiniano
Image by Izaac Constiniano
Exhibition:
Here Forever and Today, 2025
Cyanotype print on cotton, fan, archival pigment prints in frame, cardboard, found beads, and sculpture "Safety" at the Cost of All Others by Riley Ansa
Exhibited at Friends Gallery alongside fellow Glitch Lab resident artists Jack Morillo and Billion Tekleab. Curated by Chelsea Barabas and Rian Crane. The Glitch Lab was supported by the Edgelands Institute and NOTICE Coalition
Images courtesy of the artist