A Flower Watches Me at Night
Francisco Zárate

Frank Zárate studied Visual Communication Design at the National University of La Plata and completed a specialization in Conceptual Design at the National University of Tres de Febrero.

His practice explores identity, Afro-Indigenous memory, homoeroticism, and spirituality, approaching art as a form of healing. He works across drawing, printmaking, ceramics, and visual poetry.

He has participated in artist residencies at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles and Itiner-Arte in Rio de Janeiro. While in Los Angeles, he created a mural at Akbar and took part in group exhibitions in the United States and Argentina. His work has been published in Los Nadie, This Is America – Vol. 3, by El Otre Oceano, and MOYA Magazine at Columbia University. In 2025, he presented his work at the Embassy of Brazil in Argentina.

ABOUT “A FLOWER WATCHES ME AT NIGHT”

I like to think of my work as the mangrove roots I explored during my childhood: they spread and branch out along multiple paths of experimentation, moving between digital and hand-drawn practices, printmaking, and other visual experiences, while I explore my Afro-Indigenous ancestry. My practice engages with ideas of identity, racial identity, homoeroticism, and the shifting space between dreams and reality, as well as the ways in which I imagine and construct my present through a dialogue with the past.

I see artists as healers, and art as a means of transformation and healing, both for ourselves and for those around us. The diversity of my practice allows me to delve more deeply into my memories and emotions. The transition from my small island town to the vastness of Buenos Aires represented a kind of cultural rebirth that intensified and gave new force to my ongoing process of finding my voice. My practice is a healing ceremony in which the Afro-Indigenous reveals itself not as a relic, but as a seed taking root in the present—where homoeroticism is celebrated as the sacred language of the body, and displacement is transformed into a territory of personal power.