EVICTIONS
I recognize evictions occur in different ways and scales: forced migration, gentrification, environmental change, waste management, nature’s exploitation, financial dependence, social exclusion, and discrimination, these take forms of dispossession and displacement. Similarly, detachment from our pleasures, and desires; the confinement of our bodies to set shapes, structures, colors, and textures go along with the shaping of our thoughts and emotions, and this is another form of eviction - may be more pervasive - of the self and the flesh.
In the last year, I have addressed partially the impacts these processes have on bodies and memories, particularly by working with migrants and recently by working on events I have experienced. The feeling of being trapped and ripped out from what has grown attached to you can be destructive and powerful, I am interested in exploring it from different territories and emotions.
This project is expanding to recognize, archive, and translate displacements and eviction events, from being moments that are part of individual and collective biographies into aesthetic clues that go beyond the self-referential and reframe the experience of complete loss within a canon of universality.
Collecting and working with these moments also questions what happens between trauma and memory building. Do we rush into building memories as a strategy to heal? Is there an in-between? Can we assume a shattered form? Images and narratives overflow and oversaturate us at such a quick pace creating a smoke-screen of instant pain-killers, this project seeks to stay with the trauma, and resist the idea of self-reliance as a value to strive for by fostering gestures of collective reappropriation.
OUTLOUD THOUGHTS
give us rooms to inhabit the now even when it seems to be death
stifled screams
my skin doesn't hurt as much as yesterday
