Memory exists as a spatial and temporal experience in a person’s mind. Within the space of memory, we store thoughts of the past that are valuable to contain. Time, Memory and the Migrating Object considers the extent to which memory is presented by Latinx artists. Often it may show a reflection of the past that is important in the present context. While the brain is capable of incredible feats, it is also highly susceptible to forgetting or manipulating the experiences of past events due to the vast quantities of information it retains. This manipulation can be the result of the corrosion of time or the pressure of external forces. Memory can be examined through a breadth of lenses, and its meaning shifts when placed in different contexts. Throughout these contexts, memory is constantly transforming. The artworks included in Time, Memory and the Migrating Object touch on several themes and their inherent crossover into the space of memory. These include memory and its ties to intersectional culture, location, and distortion over time. Included in the exhibition, La Gran America (The Great America),The Bleeding Border, and West Side Story Upside Down, Backwards, Sideways and Out of Focus (La Maleta de Futriaco Martínez) explore visual interpretations of memory in relation to the Latinx experience of the homeland.
Ultimately, these works embody the vast scale of individual memory. While they may represent the unique experience of a single individual, they also extend beyond the artists themselves, communicating a remembrance of displacement in Latinx communities.
Sergio Gomez, The Bleeding Border, 2008, acrylic on paper/canvas. Courtesy of Sergio Gomez @sergiogomezart.
The Bleeding Border Bo Hong
Within a border is the inherent pain of rejection, the formulation of a divide that is unnatural to the landscape and the people that have resided within it as a single whole. The U.S.-Mexican border is a constant source of attention from the media and politicians, but it is seldom understood outside of the context of these political struggles and rarely humanized.
A border serves to demarcate and alienate, when the reality is that there are frequently close families that are forced to live on opposing sides of the border, and attempts to be reunited are dangerous due to escalating aggression in the enforcement of the border. (1) With the entry points of the urban environments closed off, the flow of migration is redirected to treacherous desert and the waters of the Rio Grande. The people that cross are sometimes called “mojados” (wetbacks) for floating or swimming across. (2) Human smugglers called “coyotes” are paid large sums of money to perform the increasingly dangerous task of moving desperate migrants across the border, or their children whom they may have not been in contact with for a long time due to being unable to recross the border.
The Bleeding Border addresses this topic of the dangers of secretly crossing the border, especially in the context of these young children whose lives are entrusted in the hands of coyotes, of complete strangers. The stark silhouettes of two figures in the foreground disguises their identities but is incapable of veiling their youth. With an overlay of images that present a desert landscape and a geographical representation of the U.S.-Mexican border, the bright red of the literal image of the border evokes blood and violence, both metaphorical and literal. There is a ring of text around the peripheries, the border of the image like a frame:
Illusion and deception. One door opens, another one closes before their eyes. In the silence of the night, “mojaditos” crying as they cross the line. The “coyote” is on the run. They don’t understand why. Dream and reality is their wonderland in disguise. Someone’s children, anonymous shadows to the rest of us. Thousands of unspoken and ignored inconveniences. One bleeding border, one more night. The work evokes a state of alarm from the harsh contrast and bright, illuminating lights from the childrens’ pursuers. There is a phantasmic quality to the unusual door, a threshold of white that evokes the fragmented way a child would recall incidents of a past memory they would rather forget. This alienation in a place that should be a home creates scars of distrust, like the jagged wound of the border between the nations. Anzaldúa describes this perilous crossing of mojaditos and coyotes as “refugees in a homeland that does not want them, many find a welcome hand holding out only suffering, pain, and ignoble death.” (3)
Ginger Thompson, "Crossing with Strangers: Children at the Border; Littlest Immigrants, Left in Hands of Smugglers," The New York Times, November 3, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/03/world/crossing-with-strangers-children-border-littlest-immigrants-left-hands-smugglers.html.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 11.
Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 12.
Teresa Margolles La Gran América (The Great America), 2017 1000 cobblestones cooked and burnished with the traditional techniques from Paquimé Chihuaha made by the artisan Israel Gómez. The mud was extracted from Rio Grande / Río Bravo riverbed, natural border that devides Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) and El Paso (Texas, USA) Installation view: “Sutura”, DAAD, Berlin, Germany, 2018 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich Photo: Rafael Burillo
La Gran América (The Great America) Corina Dorrego
Teresa Margolles is a visual and conceptual artist situating her practice in relation to issues of violence and death in Mexico. The artist seeks to reflect on the effect of violence and political crisis in different communities, often reflecting on the stories of “silenced subjects” and victims who would otherwise become “nameless statistics.” La Gran América (The Great America) is a large installation composed of 1000 squares made of dirt and clay extracted from the Rio Grande and the Río Bravo, which divide Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas. Each square is made using the “traditional" techniques from Paquimé, Chihuahua made by the artisan Israel Gómez. While the work is “abstract”, Margolles represents the histories of real bodies as they have experienced the crossings of the Rio Grande and the Río Bravo. The artist encompasses the experiences of thousands of people within every square, as it each holds the same particles of dirt that have been touched by migrants moving across the Mexican-American border. Each particle contains thousands of different personal histories and memories across the span of time that it has situated in the river. The clay bears the identities of those who have been lost and nameless. La Gran America (The Great America) disrupts current linear time and physical place. While the piece can be understood as a reflection of contemporary migrations, each square retells histories of ruptures and colonial displacements of indigenous lands and cultures through the formation of the Mexican and American political borders. Each tile distorts the idea of a physical place and inhabits three places at once. The clay cannot be separated from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas while simultaneously being installed in art galleries and curated fine art spaces across different lands. By blending ideas of separation, La Gran America (The Great America) redefines what is accepted as the Great “American” land, as one that is structured, divided, fragmented, and broken. American land is one that has been controlled and displaced. Margolles reminds us of this control and displacement through La Gran America (The Great America) which shelters spaces of memory, time, and history which cannot be erased or forgotten.
Galerie Peter Kilchmann, “Teresa Margolles: Biography” (accessed May 9, 2021), https://www.peterkilchmann.com/artists/teresa-margolles/biography.
Galerie Peter Kilchmann, “Teresa Margolles: La Gran América (The Great America)” (accessed May 9, 2021), https://www.peterkilchmann.com/artists/teresa-margolles/overview/la-gran-america-the-great-america-2017.
Michela Coletta, “Confronting the Pervasiveness of Violence and Marginality in the Work of Mexican Artist Teresa Margolles,” Warwick Hispanic, September 1, 2018, https://warwickhispanic.wordpress.com/2018/08/30/confronting-the-pervasiveness-of-violence-and-marginality-in-the-work-of-mexican-artist-teresa-margolles.
West Side Story Upside Down, Backwards, Sideways and Out of Focus Nora Mayer
Adál Maldonado, also known as ADÁL, was a Nuyorican artist and photographer who explored topics of Puerto Rican identity and its relationship to the New York diaspora. (1) His 2002 work West Side Story Upside Down, Backwards, Sideways and Out of Focus (La Maleta de Futriaco Martínez) uses sculpture and video collage to investigate how mainstream media's impact on broad cultural perceptions can manipulate, distort, and complicate one's relationship of his or her own identity and homeland. In the piece, ADÁL embedded a small TV monitor into the side panel of a worn, brown leather suitcase. The monitor displays a looped, twelve-minute video that blends together scenes from the 1961 film West Side Story, known for being one of the first mainstream representations of Latinx identities in mainstream film. The artist dubs over a selection of the scenes' original audio with with readings from Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri and music from Tito Puente and Brenda Feliciano, creating a discordant audio-visual collage of fragments of the otherwise familiar scenes. (2) The auditory components of the piece convey narratives relating to the experience of displacement and alienation from one's homeland, adding a new element of complexity over the Latinx characters in the film.
This work encapsulates the complex and seemingly contradictory elements of memory that are present not only in physical space, but also psychological space. By placing the monitor in the side of the suitcase, the artist emphasizes the humanity behind the identities portrayed in the film, and that they extend far beyond the duration of the film. The suitcase serves as a symbol of the divide in physical space as one crosses the border; it contextualizes the experience by suggesting a sense of impermanence of existing in a single space. It serves as a reminder to its owner that he or she not only is physically separated from the homeland, but also occupies the status of an outsider in a new land. The commonality of a suitcase as an object allows it to serve as a vehicle to represent a vessel that contains not only one's own possessions, but also contains the collection of memories as one crosses the border. The mainstreamification of the film has enabled White Americans to place a single identity or perception of complex cultures onto the Latinx community. The screen implanted in the surface of the suitcase is superimposed over these memories, suggesting that the ubiquitous nature of media can cause the owner of the memories to adopt a simplified and archetypal experience as their own when establishing their identity in a new place. It highlights the often unstated expectation for Latinx people to perform an archetype that is handed to them through White media and culture, minimizing their own complex and ever-changing relationship to the homeland that they carry into the United States. This tension ultimately provokes the viewer to consider the tension between the Latinx diaspora and its forced alignment with a single, narrow perception of what the film conveys, consequently interrupting their perception of memory and self that they physically carry across the border from their homeland into the United States.
Maximilíano Durón, "ADÁL, Key Photographer Whose Work Imagined New Futures for Puerto Rico, Has Died at 72," ARTnews, December 11, 2020. Accessed May 2, 2021.
“West Side Story Upside Down, Backwards, Sideways and Out of Focus (La Maleta De Futriaco Martínez),” Smithsonian American Art Museum. Accessed May 2, 2021.