We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dani Kriatura. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dani below.

Alright, Dani thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

By not being afraid to make mistakes, for those offer pathways and directions, and be even less afraid to course correct and start again by paying attention and still showing up. Connect with the part of you that likes to play just as we do as children, just with more discipline and focus. Channel what you need to release so it has a place to live outside your body. Do not edit or correct your work before you start creating, or else you won’t do anything.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a Chilean refugee child whose people fled the fascist military coup which took place in 1973

i was born a year and a half later and moved around a lot with just my teenage mama through parts of Europe without any status or speaking the language anywhere, until we reunited with papa who was underground.

We faced a lot of rough situations until my maternal
grandparents came to Toronto, “canada” and sent for us in 1978.

This was during a time when large canadian cities were in dire need of immigrant labor to build their whole infrastructures and work in the industries, and there were tons of us displaced people from Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and the Middle East, many with extensive education and credentials which weren’t recognized but which were exploited nonetheless to the fullest degrees.

I grew up deep in a close knit but deeply traumatized and dysfunctional first generation newly arrived refugee community raised by young traumatized parents learning to speak englsh, in a very cold, racist, xenophobic, passive aggressive and casually violent social and political environment and colonial culture which was no less barbaric to navigate for us kids in the school system and hoods and streets, as we grew up feral and often unsupervised, living on the edge with little room to be vulnerable.

I sought escape from a young age. I was fascinated and terrified by the bold colourful vivid hyper-realistic raw and often creepy over the top otherworldly pulp analog art and aesthetics of the 1970s and early 80s, particularly associated with horror, sci fi, fantasy, punk, hip-hop, queer, BDSM, religious iconography and political agitation propaganda.

I retreated deep into my own dimension, being a delicate precocious deeply autistic and traumatized child with ADHD who had seen a lot, became a juvenile delinquent who deep down wished they could be dressing in glamorous alien drag and performing musical theater.

Long story short….I went through a fucking lot, while also doing cool shit in the punk, hip-hop, goth, anarchist and underground cross-cultural/political/creative scenes.

I got to know the absolute best and worst of all those worlds, while hiding and masking my wounds and disabilities, deeply conflicted about gender and sexuality, confused about where I fit racially and culturally, in survival mode with shit boundaries, violent tendencies, horrifically low self-esteem, addictions and severe vulnerabilities i had no idea how to relate to with any tenderness or care.

Still, I found my outlets. I became a heavy duty fixture in the hardcore punk, hip-hop and activist scenes of the late 80s, 90s and early 2000s, as a DJ, underground MC/spoken word artist, poet, writer, journalist, party promoter and political agitator/,organizer, while working in factories, warehouses, shipping docks, kitchens, construction/demolition sites, and poorly run underfunded non-profits.

I went through plentiful periods where I tried so hard to leave it all behind, but I always failed. I’m too deep in this life to quit and I would have it no other way, because there is simply no peace to be found in the active commission of passive suicide. If there was, best believe I’d have found it by now.

When my daughter was born and I had to learn to parent from a distance under immensely unideal circumstances, I had to connect with a whole next level of creativity unlike anything I ever knew before.

Kicking and screaming, resisting at all turns, I have had to learn to love and protect myself in ways I never knew or was taught before, and to be in relationship with others, precisely in ways I never thought I was worthy or deserving of.

While I would be punishing and berating myself, my child and child self did their best to encourage me to just let myself play, draw pictures, play with colours, bring to life and form the beings and faces i see both in the shadows and the lights, minding and mending the gap between the hard dialectical material, and the metaphysical both visible and obscure.

I’m not being performative when I speak of being a vessel and a channeler. It’s the only way I can describe this spiritual practice of mine, which I’m only just now getting to know.

At 50 years of age at this edge of the precipse, I still feel brand new here.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

There is a lot I can say about this, so for now, i’ll say the main core barrier i have encountered and had to work diligently to reset is the disregard one can have for your own work, simply cuz it reminds you too much of you.

The core of creativity is being responsive when things don’t go as planned or you have to make something out of nothing, and fuck something up completely with all the room to make repair which you allow yourself, and take meaningful action to ensure it ends in something beautiful.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I’m just trying to live doing what I love cuz I can’t take for granted the time which exists only in the future.

I’ve almost died a few times and worked hard to amputate whole parts of myself i had to learn to grow back.

For now, I feel humble and grateful I can invest time and energy doing things I love, collaborating in community, telling stories and doing what I increasingly come to recognize as deep healing work both for myself and those I am in relationship with.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bodythudz_artisanworks/
• Facebook: Dani Kriatura (Kreachur)

Image Credits

The photo of me was taken by Leilah Dhore.

All the pics of my artwork I took myself.