Where I End and You Begin: Family, Kinship and the Labours of Survivance
Before embarking on this project with Duane Linklater (Omaskêko Ininiwak, born 1976) and Tanya Lukin Linklater (Sugpiaq, born 1976), I couldn’t tell you the last time, if there ever was a time – that I came across a byline for an exhibition with the following structure: ‘Artist’s name with artist’s relative’s name and another relative’s name’. Not a familial art collective, but a familial co-authorship, a kind of distribution of artistic ego towards the artist’s relations, towards loved ones, without whose care and labour the works would not exist.
Repeat ad infinitum: Belen Santamarina
When I first step into Belen’s studio, I am struck by its unexpected orderliness. For an artist whose medium is human hair- those stray strands we recoil from in shower drains or wedged into the crevices of chairs- Belen’s space recalls the precision and care of a Wunderkammer. Not a single strand is lost to the bin or the drain here; she pulls out little Tupperware containers, each containing just a few strands, neatly categorised by colour and texture. There’s a quiet reverence here, a kind of ritual care for what we usually neglect once it’s detached from the body.
Gut feelings: Indigestibility as an archive of surplus Otherness
My mother always told me to bleed discreetly. I have taken heed of this warning in my pursuits, biting my tongue before the words can spill over. But the wound festers, and now I find myself bleeding on everything I touch, so to speak. I want to admit the wound for the little girl I was, picking at this scab, begging to be believed. So I return to those nostalgia-steeped snapshots of girlhood, and interspersed between there’s the crispness of a particular, recurring bodily mechanism: vomiting. I didn’t know at the time, but nausea- its psychological and ideological loadedness- would critically recalibrate my relationship to just about everything. Indeed, when it comes to primal bodily sensations, Moveable Feast is deeply indebted to my illness, for the set of experiences it granted me.
Abject vessels: Laura Aguilar’s renegotiations of Chicana identity
Between two flags- an American and a Mexican one- a bare-chested woman is held captive: her body is bound by a thick cargo rope, snaking around the neck like a noose; her clenched fists tethered, pendulous breasts bulging over. Her head is hooded by a Mexican flag, whose key motif- an eagle devouring a serpent atop some prickly nopal- covers her face. Below the waist, she is wrapped in an American flag, half stripes, half stars. Born from the interstice between ostensible thesis and antithesis- between the U.S. and Mexico, subordination and desire, oppression and resistance- this is the mise-en-scene of Three Eagles Flying (1990), a photographic self-portrait by the late Chicana artist Laura Aguilar.