reflections

In the beginning of the semester, as I tried to make sense of this class which seemed hard for me to break into, I found myself describing the course to a friend as comprised of poetic intent, poetic technique. In a way, the class felt like it was teaching us to be poets: poetic lenses perhaps precedes, in someway, poetic thought, poetry. 

I began this semester in the strange place of attempting to deny past, forget memory, despite in many ways feeling intensely controlled and trapped by personal histories. 

Being away from home for many months had made things that had once been (treasured) repositories of memory fade. Another conversation with another friend, a man who had also spent roughly the same amount of time away, in Bosnia, making films. I don’t remember how closely our new, evolving relationships to memory resembled each other, but I recall trying to explain that it was something more than nostalgia that objects, artefacts of my very own quotidian, carried. I recalled how seeing the stuff of life that I had curated and chosen out of the arbitrariness of unordered stuff of the universe, sometimes things I had created out of the same arbitrary material reservoir, seemed to draw things into order and infuse me with certainties otherwise elusive. The green of the bed spread and the green of the tree outside. At some pointed I had painted about seven tiles of paper, thickly, thickly, with paint, thinking with each one of a dear and beloved friend. I used wooden clothespins donated by my then-boyfriends grandmother, painted in cheap acrylic pinks and oranges, to hang them from a tangle of christmas lights, wrested from that unruly and mysterious museum of Old Things our garage. The cards were always there as I moved about life, soft reiterations of beloved certainties that I couldn’t always see (most of my friends had moved out of the city), soft reiterations of who I was and could be to them. (I’ve been reading theories of alterity lately, and am reminded of how contact with an “other” reflexes back to reconstitute, modify, one’s own self sense. I would see these from my bed, and at times when things felt hopeless, when I despaired, I recall the peace and stability that this installation of sorts seemed to softly offer up. All objects were like this: clothes, saucepans, familiar foods, streets—even the ones that I hated—reverberated with faces, feelings. 

What I was trying to tell my friend was that as much as memory can get swept up in the arms nostalgic, it has a power entirely its own. I’ve always found it hard to get rid of old things. It is not nostalgia: it is the fear of forgetting. And, it is the loss of presence. The loss of one’s own “ordering of things”, to invoke Foucault, in a world of systems and orderings to which you’ve never given your consent. 

Between Bombay, Singapore, Tokyo, Kottayam, and, finally, Istanbul, Memory and Presence worked themselves out in different ways. But I returned with a new fear: a fear of the chains of memory, of the prison of the past. Memory includes silent darknesses, some sort of live organism that is entirely thought; from these, I felt, I could finally claim a sort of freedom. 

I'm not from here, nor from there

I have no age, nor future

and I wanted so badly for the following  proposals, in the absence of anchorage, to be true: 

Chavela Vargas continues

and being happy is the colour

of my identity

I have few items formally of those places, and my new desire for an ascetic aesthetic of existence couldn’t last: California is too unkind a place for beauty not too matter. But memory leaked out also in different forms. Often, mirage like, the streets, the buildings seemed to flicker and static and then it was not the flat gray concrete panels of Berkeleyen sidewalks under my feet but the brown red bricks of Istiklal Caddesi, catching the light in so many different ways. Buildings flickered, unsure, unstable… 

Two themes were recurrent in this class: Memory, and the (possibility of/the right to) someone else’s place and culture. I don’t have answers. Throughout the semester the desire to kill the past battled the resurrect and remember old meanings. There was the uncertainty of appropriating the meaningfulness of Mexico and its history and its present into my own personal framework. If Memory and Transcultural Transposal defined the questions that this course most consistently brought up for me, my answers tended provoke the the possibilities of fierce ambivalence, under which a sea of ambiguities roiled uncertainly. Ambivalence however is only so productive before one is forced to admit impasse. 

In terms of my artwork: I started with a number of experiments, that attempted not to translate texts to image, nor function as narrative metaphors, but become expressions of the things itself i had in mind. (This, of course, can never be completely successful, given the limitations of representation as external to being—expressions of being, rather than being itself)—but as at some point I began to feel a certain uncertainty about doing this with a history/culture that I have no clear personal relationship to, and I admit, there was, at points, a desire to ‘fit in’ and become legible. All of my worst, and least favourite projectos fall into this second category, and indeed, they were the ones I approached with the most confusion and inhibition. They also correlate to a point in which life outside the class felt, for various reasons, particularly unstable, alien, and uncontrolled. The final two projectos were, in some ways, a return to my own. Not exactly a reassertion of self perhaps, but an acceptance of self as existing within, among the arbitrary.