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.