There is Here
By Bianca M. Morán
I remember, quite vividly, reading There There and coming across the passage where we borrowed the epigraph for the exhibition. As my eyes crossed the page, I encountered the words:
An apple is red on the outside and white on the inside. But what we are is what our ancestors did. How they survived. We are the memories we don’t remember, which live us which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us.
I stopped reading after the last sentence, and I exclaimed (to myself) “Wow––that is beautiful.” I underlined the passage, took a picture of it and sent it to my cohort. The response was almost immediate, they knew, as I did that there was a sentiment embedded in those words that perfectly encapsulated what we were trying to capture in our exhibition. It would be a few months later, when the idea came to us to use part of that paragraph as the introduction of our exhibition.
Words are important to me. I love the sounds that words together make, the way they can communicate a sentiment that resonates or elicit an emotional response. I love how certain words, when put together, can be so exact and revelatory, how they can precisely articulate a moment, a memory or feeling. I love when words paint a picture.
“But what we are is what our ancestors did….which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do”.... in There, There, I thought of Sebastian Hernandez: the way that they use dance, movement and kinetic memory. I remember that our legs carry the weight that our ancestors bore in order to give us our form, our strength, our stride. I think about the ways our feet move only with the permission our bones give us, and those bones are made from the fibers passed down through those that came before us.
We are what our ancestors did, and more, we are made of what they were.
The Performative Interventions of Beatriz Cortez, Sebastian Hernandez, and Joiri Minaya
By Joseph Daniel Valencia
When I think about the exhibition one never remembers alone, my mind often goes to artists Sebastian Hernandez, Beatriz Cortez, and Joiri Minaya, whose works on view formed captivating sonic and visual invitations into the exhibition space. Hernandez’s dynamic eight-foot-wide video installation dominated the gallery’s entrance, while Cortez’s quieter door sculpture (part of a larger installation) and Minaya’s video piece often lured visitors further inside. Since mounting the exhibition, I have been reflecting on the power of these works--how each artist tapped into their bodies to produce critical interventions into personal and collective memory.
In their video BROWN ZERO (2016), Sebastian Hernandez can be seen performing underneath the Fourth Street Bridge (coincidently located near the Los Angeles Arts District where this exhibition was held). Their brown body adorned in traditional danza Azteca attire, they spring into the air and dance across an earthen floor. Lasers, fire sparks, and footage of collapsing buildings emerge through superimposed and slowed-down digital layers, converting Hernandez’s once serene performance into a potentially violent and precarious scene.
Riffing off “ground zero,” a phrase evoking a site of detonation and loss, BROWN ZERO meditates on the histories of violence experienced by indigenous peoples of the Americas from the colonial period to the present. The work asks: what has been lost or erased through colonization and through the numerous attempts to eradicate indigenous populations? And how do the inheritors of these systemic violences process and heal from these legacies? For black and brown people in the Americas, the violence of ancestral trauma lives in our blood, in our DNA, and it continues to manifest and impact us today.
For Hernandez, performance provides a vehicle for connecting to the past while also addressing the challenges of the present moment. As the video continues, Hernandez dances through the lasers, and through the fire, despite their circumstances. Through the ritual of dance, they embody the spirit of resiliency passed down and preserved through generations, and as they continue to perform, they enact forms of inherited memory and history, to chart a path forward.
The body is also the medium of choice for Joiri Minaya. In her video Siboney (2014), the artist spends hours producing a large-scale mural of a tropical landscape only to destroy it. Minaya mixes her own pigments and meticulously renders a brilliant scarlet and cerulean flower pattern across one of the walls of the Centro León in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic. While the paint is still wet, Minaya runs into the mural, dragging her body over it, and leaving it ruined.
As an artist with Dominican roots, Minaya problematizes the notion of a picture-perfect tropical paradise and provides a gripping social critique: Who gets to experience paradise in the Caribbean? And who has been bound by it, literally, but also socially, politically, and economically? This line of inquiry has persisted throughout Minaya’s artistic practice.
In a later photographic work, Container (2015), Minaya wraps herself in a spandex encasing surrounded by lush green leaves. The stretched fabric and vibrant greenery suffocate her and speak to histories exploitation of African diasporic peoples through colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Minaya employs this tropical encasing once more in The Cloaking… (2019), a public intervention in which she enshrouds a Christopher Columbus statue near the Bayfront Park Amphitheatre in Miami, directly challenging the figure’s celebration and canonization as a brave and curious discoverer of the New World.
Minaya’s works serve as cathartic releases and interventions into the public and historical record. Through these works, she speaks to African diasporic people, past and present, who have put their lives and bodies on the line to build and maintain the empires of this hemisphere. Her interventions confront these legacies, while simultaneously challenging viewers to consider how they may have been complicit.
Another artist in the exhibition, Beatriz Cortez, confronts legacies of war and forced migration in Central America. In her three-piece installation, Cortez looks inward to extract memories of her upbringing in San Salvador, El Salvador. The artist fled her hometown at the age of eighteen during the violent, twelve-year Salvadoran Civil War, which incited terror on government officials, clergy members, academics, and civilians.
For survivors of war, there is a violence to memory, to remembering, and at times it might be easier to try to forget. Nevertheless, Cortez remembers the killings, the disappearances, and human rights violations of her war-torn country, and draws upon these memories to create stunning works. Her video installation, Childhood Bedroom (2012-2017), recreates the room where she was raised and features posters of Archbishop Óscar Romero, a leader of the Salvadoran Catholic Church and vocal critic of the violence of the armed forces, right-wing groups, and leftist guerrillas involved in El Salvador’s civil conflict. Despite Romero’s role as a beacon of hope for many, Cortez could have never had these posters in her room during the war for fear of persecution. Thus, Cortez’s intervention into her own memory of her bedroom serves as a commemorative act of resistance.
The Couch of Memory (2019) brings to life the couch Cortez’s parents purchased as young immigrants in New York and kept when they returned to El Salvador, holding the memories of the family’s time in both locations. Cortez’s reproduction of the ordinary couch, fabricated in unfinished steel, also preserves traces of those who touch it, serving as an archive of memory for the exhibition.
Adjacent to these works is Cortez’s The Door (2012) a self-made portal installed between two walls and constructed from fragmented pieces of wood to allow only a glimpse into the domestic interior. Underscoring the potential fragmentation of our own memories, this wall also sealed off the installation from other elements of the exhibition, creating a room of intimate memories, and also of memory sharing.
For black and brown people in the Americas, there is no doubt that the violences of colonialism, slavery, and war have shaped our world as we know it. As Cortez, Hernandez, and Minaya confront these legacies in their work—and as they highlight, challenge, and critique structures of power on a deeply personal level—they show us that we too are powerful and, through art, we can heal.
__________
“Saint Óscar Romero.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, March 20, 2020, accessed April 20, 2020; available online: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oscar-Arnulfo-Romero.
Photography and the Familiar: Reflecting on the Photographs of Amal Amer, Ann Le, and Adee Roberson
By Loujain Bager
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
― Susan Sontag , On Photography (11)
While studying art history I learned about the concept of memento mori, a Latin phrase that translates to “remember you must die” aimed to remind us of our own mortality. This was often depicted by particular iconographies such as skulls, clocks, flowers, candles, and fruits. Although including these symbols is common in depictions of the concept of memento mori they are not the only reminders of our fleeting mortality. Photographs rupture the notion of time by capturing a moment in time that would have once been a fleeting memory. Photography expresses our mortality by encapsulating memories of places, people and time.
In my apartment I have photographs of my family members taped to my walls honoring some who I never had the chance to meet while they were alive. Despite never having met these family members, having their photographs allows me to share space and connect with them in my own home. When I moved to California, I had never visited the state, was moving to a new space, and for the first time, I was living alone. Having the photographs of my family members and the places where I grew up was healing and comforting to me.
In a similar manner, three artists in one never remembers alone--Amal Amer, Ann Le, and Adee Roberson--use photography to visualize and connect to family members by transmitting images of different cultures, homelands, and time periods through their artwork. I was interested in how each of the artist’s works are part of a larger photographic series and how each artist utilizes layering in different ways. In Amer’s autobiographical Hayat series (2017), they layer personal objects that belong to their family members and other cultural signifiers to create large-scale digital photographs. Le’s World Wars series (2019) is a photomontage series that overlays archival images from the Vietnam War with her own family photographs. While in Roberson’s West Palm Beach (2019), she screen prints bright colors onto family photographs and displays them on a wallpaper produced from a Jamaican restaurant menu.
Amer includes synthetic and genuine flowers alongside personal objects belonging to their Yemeni family in their photographs. Le uses documentation of her own family photographs with famous photographs of the Vietnam war. Roberson explores her connection to Jamaica through screen printing on archival images of her family and the wallpaper print of the Jamaican restaurant. Each of the series use different techniques but ultimately they are about the artists’ families. The photographs are able to encapsulate time and although I never met Amer, Le, and Roberson’s family members represented in their photographs, I am able to relate to them.
Music, Karaoke, and Collectivity in the Work of Boone Nguyen
By Carlo Tuason
Boone Nguyen, Landscape Memory, 2019 (still)
There’s something rather unique about music and its relationship with time. For listeners and performers alike, music creates a specific type of temporality: a temporality wherein one is aligned with others. In a chamber music ensemble, often the players signal to one another and breathe together before the piece begins. This breath—the depth, the duration, the physical sensation—is so crucial to beginning the piece together. It must be felt together. Throughout the piece, the players listen intensely to one another, establishing eye contact when necessary, physically moving similarly, so that the timing and shape of the musical phrase, whether pushed, pulled, or stretched, remains consistent and “in control.” The use of”‘in control” here is deliberate, as musicians are intentionally and willfully manipulating the phenomenology of time. Audiences and listeners must buy into this temporality, this pacing, this suspension of —or rather recreation of an alternate— experience of time. As such, the experience of sharing music with others and listening or performing collectively can be viewed as a form of building community.
Although this notion is relatively universal, it is especially pertinent in the context of the exhibition one never remembers alone. In this way, as well others, music creates a space to remember. It creates a space to be present with one another. It challenges the perceived hegemony of time over human existence, if only for a few moments.
Boone Nguyen, Landscape Memory, 2019, installation
Photograph by Monica Orozco
Landscape Memory, a three-channel video installation by artist and organizer Boone Nguyen, explores the complexities of diasporic remembering as Nguyen returns to the rural village where his extended family lives in Vietnam. The video documents and juxtaposes varying ways of remembering and honoring the dead, such as cleaning burial sites and burning incense, with bomb crater-turned-lakes, reclaimed over time by nature, in addition to the act of the journey itself. Throughout these videos he layers natural ambient sounds, intimate conversations, and music. While there were other works in one never remembers alone with audio, the specific clips that Nguyen included in Landscape Memory echoed throughout the gallery space in a way that teased the ears of visitors with dramatic and soaring melodic lines, occasionally drifting in and out of earshot. The way the music layers and intermingles with the other audio channels of Landscape Memory— the low bass rumblings of bus/boat/motorcycle engines, the effervescent yet faint sound of rain, the sharp crow of a rooster, the varied tonalities and emotions of the conversations— exemplifies a structure of memory. Sometimes memories present as clear, sharp, in-focus. Other times, memories are fuzzy, somewhat distant, complicated by other happenings, other images, other stories, sounds, faces, histories. Although music is just one of the layers Nguyen employs here, it creates space and carries memory in rather powerful ways.
The music he carefully weaves throughout the videos are short excerpts from popular contemporary Vietnamese folk music sung at karaoke. The two songs, “Anh Biết Không Anh” by Lưu Ánh Loan and “Người Tình Không Đến,” originally written by Ngân Giang, bring together traditional Vietnamese instruments, such as the dan tranh, with those of a standard lounge music ensemble. The audio clips in Landscape Memory of these two songs were collected from a family member’s party and from the next door neighbor of his relatives in Vietnam, respectively. The framing of these songs as karaoke is key. By situating these karaoke recordings within the context of Landscape Memory, Nguyen is locating karaoke, and more broadly music, as sites for collective memory making and remembering. In these communal suspensions of time, in these open spaces, people have the opportunity to remember (and mourn) more freely.
There’s a certain catharsis inherent in experiencing music and karaoke. When you take the microphone during karaoke, you become the pop star, the center of attention, the main stage performer. With that microphone in hand, it doesn’t matter how good or bad you sound, if you miss the entrance, if your voice cracks or if you miss a note. Rather, what matters is how much you feel the music and by extension how much those around you feel it as well. Karaoke is a place for imagination. Maybe, amongst these lush soundscapes and within the embodied phenomenology of karaoke and music, there’s a place for forgetting. Not necessarily the forgetting of a specific memory or of a broader history, but a temporary forgetting-- a temporary loss of inhibitions, of self, of time, of place. Maybe this space of forgetting is where the collective remembering and imagining happens.
Re-visiting Re-memory: Beloved vis à vis one never remembers alone
By Eve Moeykens-Arballo
In 1987 Toni Morrison published Beloved, Morrison’s fifth novel and most “celebrated” novel to date. Inspired by the idea of a novel about the contradictory logic of parenthood under the conditions of enslavement, Morrison remembered a news clipping she had seen in a book she had published while at Penguin Random House, The Black Book, about Margaret Garner. After facing a return to slavery after escaping, Garner chose to murder of one of her children rather than let them be returned to the owner’s plantation was a jumping off point for Morrison in shaping Beloved. Set in Ohio after the Civil War, Beloved recounts the story of a mother, Sethe who is confronted with a ghost from her past. The novel unflinchingly examines the caustic legacy of slavery, taking the reader into the imprisoning nature of painful memories desperate to stay alive, and how they eventually find their peace.
Very early in our curatorial conversations about one never remembers alone, we knew as a group that the transmissions of memory from generation to generation would prove to be a vital vein in our conceptual process. As we also wanted to center our exhibition around the experiences of people from the global south and diasporas, we were quick to acknowledge that things could get heavy, quickly. We wanted to avoid reminiscing or cultivating nostalgia around painful and often traumatic memories.
Enter Beloved. While the novel is a dive into “the abyss of slavery,” Beloved shows the process of healing from start to finish. The way the ghostly personage of Beloved infects Sethe like an open wound undoubtedly hurts, however, the wound heals; Beloved leaves. The intervention of Sethe’s other daughter, Denver, snaps Sethe out of the spell of despair which was draining her life force. This intervention is followed by the healing presence of community, a community which supports and brings Sethe back to life. Beloved was initially introduced into our conversation as a text which exemplified the importance of remembering to process and heal from painful memories. As our conversations continued, it was Morrison’s notion of “rememory” which took hold as a critical lens through which to look at the exhibiting artists and their work. To quote the introductory curatorial text:
“As a corollary, one never remembers alone also explores ‘rememory,’ as coined by Toni Morrison in her novel Beloved. Rememory refers to the recollection of an obscured memory that can be similar to a haunting, an uncanny sensation of both familiarity and unfamiliarity.” ”
Revisiting this concept after the closure of the exhibition, the reason why rememory felt and continues to feel so right in thinking about one never remembers alone has become richly more complicated.
In Beloved, the concept of rememory is introduced early on. As Denver walks home, she remembers the story of her birth as told to her by her mother. For a moment, through Denver, we enter Sethe’s perspective directly. When Denver enters the house, she notices her mother speaking. Sethe is eventually convinced to explain:
“ I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.’ ‘Can other people see it?’ asked Denver. ‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.’”
In this context, Morrison emphasizes how a rememory is a singular and collective experience. A rememory can be experienced by the person whose memory it came from, and it can be stumbled upon. In the context of viewing artwork, as the content is in front of you, the space for encountering a rememory is more specific. It is difficult to describe the intangible impingement that is rememory. The best I can say is that the subject knows when they have come across one. A friend of mine approached me after having seen Boone Nguyen’s Landscape Memory. She very sincerely told me this piece touched her very deeply. As someone whose family disappeared during the Armenian genocide, she felt intimately acquainted with the search for family burial sites.
Still from Boone Nguyen’s Landscape Memory
Nguyen’s work opened a door for her to personally experience this search. Nguyen himself, by choosing film as his medium for this work, poetically creates the “thought picture” that Morrison describes. Landscape Memory is the documentation of a collection of feelings and experiences of a place, a thought picture impermanently permanent displayed on a screen. If we consider how rememory may interact with the artistic process of creating what can be called a memory work, a category which loosely captures all of the workin one never remembers alone, we see that a series of transmissions are taking place. At the first stage, the artists imagine themselves literally or metaphysically in the place of another, or as in the case of Beatriz Cortez Childhood Bedroom, in the place of a past self. In the space of the white cube, we as spectators have a not-so spontaneous interaction with these visual tokens of the past. In the case of my friend, Boone Nguyen’s piece triggered a rememory in her. For the rest of us, the precise nature of how what we viewed will stick with us remains to be seen, as it takes the passing of time to know what will just stay.
Postscript
It all begins with an idea.
Intense colors and verdant tropical landscapes, projections of a domestic setting and bodies in motion, mementos and family photographs echoing the past…these are just a few of the striking images I recall from one never remembers alone, curated by the 2020 graduates of the USC Roski MA Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere Program. While memory is often fleeting, fragmented, or fuzzy, this exhibition examines artists who transmit intergenerational memories through extremely vivid visual images, archival materials, kinship, and embodied experiences. one never remembers alone evoked the powerful visuality I’ve described above, as it also explored the performativity, temporality, spatiality and sociality of memory.
The five curators––Loujain Bager, Eve Moeykens-Arballo, Bianca M. Morán, Carlo Tuason and Joseph Daniel Valencia––mined their own diverse backgrounds and intellectual interests to curate a group exhibition of artists who reveal personal memories and histories through different cultural lenses and diasporic contexts. Ultimately, the collective work in one never remembers alone coalesced both conceptually and visually, while successfully retaining the individuality and heterogeneity of the artists and the curators themselves.
The exhibition, its accompanying public programs, and this website is the culmination of the USC Roski Curatorial Practicum, a three-semester course that balances history and theory with practical skills necessary to curate the final MA Project. Each MA cohort engages in all phases of the curatorial process: developing the initial concept; installing, producing and presenting the project; organizing a public interface; and documenting it in a print publication and/or online presentation.
This process can be both highly collaborative and unexpectedly contentious (sometimes both) but returning again to the idea of memory, I cannot recall a cohort group that has been as dedicated, engaged, and generous as the curators of one never remembers alone.
As I write this in the midst of my pandemic self-isolation, I am reminded of the critical importance of collaboration, collegiality, and generosity not just in our own curatorial practices, but also in our everyday lives.
Karen Moss
Director, MA Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere Program
University of Southern California