Around 90 to 95 percent of tissues of things that are eaten in the water column get recycled. As Anne [Gardulski] told me, “Nobody dies of old age in the ocean.” —Christina Sharpe, In the Wake Today the ocean may seem like a coherent body of water, as if all the scars made from…
1. Despite my disdain for predictability and repetitiveness, I have found myself starting all correspondences with friends and loved ones with the same greeting: I hope you are surrounded with lots of love and support amidst fascism! Although I am aware that no amount of love or support may protect one from fascism, I find…
As this year of all kinds of wonders come to a closing, I’m going to try to remember it through a list of things, exhibitions and events with interesting linkages. This list is in no way all inclusive or written from “perfect memory.” This year was full of death and destruction, and I’m not only talking about the…
The question of aesthetics is a question of decisions: what makes a maker choose one thing over the other, one topic, material, medium, angle of approach, display, etc. over the many other possibilities. Whether these decisions are structural or “unconscious”, or an attempt to do away with those structures, aesthetic decisions are deeply and inherently…
I write this on the seventh anniversary of my immigration to the U.S. To me, being an immigrant, similar to being queer, is about making new relations in the world. From the vantage point of immigration’s disorienting spatiotemporal (dis)placement, nothing’s going to be “the same,” as “sameness” is rendered irrelevant with a constantly wiggling reference…
Attending a few of the previous talks from the “What Is Contemporary?” series at MOCA Los Angeles, I was particularly interested in the last iteration: What is Contemporary? Black Lives Matter: Patrisse Cullors and Tanya Lucia Bernard in Conversation on Thursday, July 7. Given the last week’s police shootings and killings of Alton Sterling and…
Wars never end in the past. A cease-fire is never the end to the war, no matter how much further destruction it may prevent. No matter the point in time, the damage is done. Ruins, neither here, nor there, are carried around in bodies, in the heads, feet and the arms of people, in the…
I place my body in spaces where I find myself delicately balancing between the confines of the clocking in and the clocking out, the dreams of leaving and dreams of roots, the longing and not BE longing. Words overflow from these experiences. Like laughters and tears, they flow uncontrollably. I collect these tearful, at times,…
Last January and February LACE hosted the exhibition Customizing Language as part of the Emerging Curator’s Program. The exhibition included many great pieces by some of the artists I respect the most. Raquel Gutiérrez wrote a beautiful piece on the exhibition on Hyperallergic. Here, though I am going to retrospectively reflect on one particular piece in the…