The past, the present, the absent ( Valid until 30 June 2010 – Day 109-Day 106)
Day 109
My great-grandfather was living his whole life in a liminal space. Between America of his youth and a nameless country of his ancestors. I am just wondering can you pass the sorrow through your genome, can you endure the pain, confusion and lost of identity? Does the fact that we share same name, same set of information also means that me, his great granddaughter have to re-walk his path? I find him as the only reference point in my lonely journey. Me and him, on the same line, on the border forever. Me and him with the same dilemma. Which side of the border to choose? He had tones of photographs that he rarely shared, moments captured on screen. He dreamed of the West, I long for the East. Our lives on the border, defined by our own choice, recorded with bypassed technology created for someone else pleasure.
Day 106
“White goes unmarked in our culture, its meaning unquestioned, its stability assumed.” (Blocker 1999, p.68)
I think that I am not white enough. That I can hide behind my whiteness until my data is not revealed. And then I am discolored. Though, white is not a color. It is a play of light. And I play along, crossing from the light side into the dark side. I become invisible. Absent.
Miwon Kwon argues that the dominant presence of absence in Ana Mendieta’s work is indicative of an “aesthetic articulation of the lost” and her forced separation both from her family and homeland. Kwon describes Mendieta’s work as a spiritual wandering of an exile’s quest for her origins, a quest in which the nature and persona; experience of origin are blended or even “confused”. Mendieta on the contrary says about her work: “My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me with the universe.”
The viewer always arrives too late on the scene. There is only the screen of the borderland there to confront the viewer. The immediacy of the body that is marking the landscape, has already been transformed from origin to trace, transformed from event to memory to desire.
