Piedrín

So, let’s say I have been making art, “art” in quotation marks, because I am not so concerned with art alone. I feel my concern is life, life and how it moves… I first became interested in performance because I realized, ever since I was a child, like I told you, that it was a reflection of the collective, the reaction of the collective to social pain and also turmoil. At least for me, as an artist, social issues take up a lot of thought… That is why I was saying that, for me, art is not art, but life…

Probablemente en otro lugar la gente se comporte con otro tipo de emocionalidad, de actitud; en cambio a mi todo me lanza al movimiento, al coraje, a veces puedo estar llorando tremendamente o riéndome para buscar un escape. Pero siempre en el fondo, en todo es para llegar al arte, porque el arte no es más que la vitrina de la vida, eso es…

In 2016, I move to Guatemala with my Espanglish and three suitcases full of books and nothing else. There was a flood in my apartment that same week and I lose most of my books. I remain without known words, without my constant companions of many years, without anything from my previous life.

I write a letter and at the end I put two X's, which mean two kisses, at least from my context.

A friend tells me that here two X's means death.

What do you do when every sign has a different meaning? How can you understand a world in which your kiss is translated as death?

[I should note here that I keep pausing as I write this text. That I avoid my computer, repelled by this document, even as I feel compelled to work through it. This feeling of dread reaffirms the importance of writing through it, even as I know so many more eloquent voices have already written through this, even as I know we should be looking at other works in the biennial rather than giving this one more space. "Only sheer violence is mute," writes Hannah Arendt, and I am reassured that even when my words fail, they are a kind of (imperfect) action. "...finding the right words at the right moment, quite apart from the information or communication they may convey, is action," she writes, as if pushing me to face this essay and my dread.]

Pero esa es la cuestión con la memoria. A veces, a medida que se desvanece se hace más clara. A veces su proceso de transformación la hace más accesible, nos recuerda su valor. Este tipo de blanquedad embotada que Boror utiliza sea tal vez también intuición. Es decir, a medida que nos enfrentamos a nuestros días hay una resaca de recuerdos, de gente perdida, de historias duras, del pasado que se cierne en nuestra visión periférica. Cuando Schutz pintó el cuerpo presente de Till lanzó esa imagen hacia un relieve agudo y doloroso, entre otros motivos, debido a su subjetividad en relación al tema del cuadro. “¿Es mejor tratar de hacer algo imposible, porque te importa, y fracasar, o no enfrentarlo nunca?” pregunta a Calvin Tompkins para el New Yorker. Este es ahora el dilema de la blanquedad, creo. Es decir, ¿qué hacemos con ella? ¿Cómo fracasamos mejor en nuestros esfuerzos por delinear lo que es, lo que hace, lo que hacemos con ella o en su contra? ¿Cómo abrirnos a lo que puede significar y admitir lo que ha significado?

Their faces would peer out of class photographs, or the names of their family would appear on labels for certain displays. It was a museum that almost no one visited, but it was a place where I could find traces of my family, my past, and could understand something about where I came from, after we moved far away. Distance from (one kind of) home and (one notion of) family changes how you understand who you are, and where you locate your people. I think about how we choose what to hold on to, in this transitory state between places.

En Stafford, Kansas, donde mis abuelos trabajan la tierra, hay un museo comunitario, es el único lugar donde se puede ver la historia de ese pueblo a punto de desaparecer; recuerdo las entradas históricas sobre odontología y fotografía, los archivadores llenos de fotos de las escuelas rurales, las cunas con muñecos donados mostrando cierta forma de hacer una vida.

En un territorio en el que los temblores son parte de la danza cotidiana, en el que las montañas caen sobre aldeas, colonias marginales, sobre carreteras y sobre las personas que tratan de desenterrar a quienes ya fueron sepultados por el alud; en un territorio en el que demasiadas cosas se derrumban, arden, se quiebran hemos aprendido a caminar entre los escombros.

In a land in which earthquakes are part of our daily dance, in which the mountains fall over the villages, over marginal neighborhoods, over highways and even over those who go to help others who have been buried by the avalanche; in a land in which so many things collapse, burn, and break, we have learned to walk in the rubble.