Christian Casas is a first-generation Cuban-American artist, curator, and educator from Hialeah, Florida. He creates gatherings of found objects, video, set and sound design, familial photographs, pyrography, ceramics, printmaking, and painting to explore intergenerational memory, selfhood, and erasure within a diasporic experience. This first published volume of his work features the infamous image of Elian Gonzalez repeated page after page, the image growing duller and duller as the series progresses, laying bare the effect of repetition and memory. The book includes over 90 pages of risograph-printed reproductions of artist originals, a hand-written artist statement, and image index in the back. Each copy of the limited edition artist publication includes a hand-drawn crayon coloring page created by the artist along with a pack of crayons, inviting the viewer to complete the second coloring page. Reproductions in the book represent a large body of originals that utilize watercolor, oil pastel, graphite, concrete poetry, video, and steel-plate monoprint.

Artist statement:

“In 2000, Elian Gonzalez became embroiled in a heated international custody and immigration controversy involving the governments of Cuba and the United States. When I was 15, a SWAT team raided my home in Miami, Florida, and took me out of my room at gunpoint with my hands up. They were serving a warrant for someone already incarcerated for transporting Cubans to the States. Eventually, Elian was brought back to his father in Cuba, and I was led outside, where I was reunited with my family. Elian and I are the same age; he's graduated from college with a degree in Engineering, got married, and is expecting his first child. He works at a state-run company and is usually seen sitting courtside at the regime's rallies. What role will I play?”

—Christian Casas

Paperback, spiral bound, 7.5”wide x10” tall. The majority of the book is risograph-printed by Cereal Box Studio, with a silkscreen cover printed by Cryptogram. Created as a limited edition of 200 copies. Book design by Katie Ladd. All content Copyright 2025 Christian Casas. ISBN: 979-8-9887543-1-2