PORTALS AND NODES (ongoing project w/ Kimberly Arriaga-Gonzalez)

This project started next to the ocean, under the night sky, witness to the full moon on a beach in Punta Sal, in the north of Peru.

Kim is a poet, and I work as an interdisciplinary artist; we met thanks to our respective Fulbright experiences in Peru. Through conversations, workshopping, and imagining together we began a collaborative vision of making diasporic affect tangible. Every migrant’s journey involves a degree of worldbuilding, re-creating one’s self anew; and as we reckoned with both our north american and south american selves, we wondered how to make those pathways and pensamientos into beautiful and profound expressions. We consider ourselves doble-cara interlopers, our collaborative work is informed by a refusal to abide solely by American identity; rejecting binary definitions of “here” and “there,” embodying decolonial practice.

Because neither of us have ever fully assimilated into the American understanding of “latinidad,” we both feel suspended between belonging and rejection, becoming and undoing, north and south americas. 

INSTALLATION & PERFORMANCE

The idea behind PORTALS AND NODES is that it is a living, iterative project, one day expanding even beyond our capability as duo. However, in its (current) emergent phase we started with the melding of poetry and sound that together express a range of emotions from the latin-american diaspora. From longing, rencor, melancolia, joy, to falling in love, the beauty in banality, and conocimiento felt when in community, our work touches on all of these ideas in poetic form and channels them through the act of conjuring (live performance). The strategy of our project is this: we create site-specific “NODES:” artistic installations of audio, small sculpture, and found objects arranged into altar-like presentations that emit sound via speaker. These NODES are then activated into “PORTALS” by live performance, which channels energy, history, feeling, and possibility through the PORTAL to reach our audiences. Each PORTAL must be site-specific because we consider community, locational politics, and culture of place central to our project and respective practices.

The video at the top of this page is a performance of our first collaboration under this project: the poem is On being tumbled, written by Kimberly Arriaga-Gonzalez, and the composition/cello performance/recording was done by Stephanie Cuyubamba Kong. Performing on this day were Stephanie Cuyubamba Kong and Khanthida Mounivong (theatre MA) at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, Texas, as part of the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts’ Convergence Research series. The speakers bring multi-layered instrument voice into the space, and the live cello and spoken word further activate the space, taking the audience with us through the PORTAL that was conjured through performance. In this case, the installation aspect was not brought to life because of the surrounding exhibition (Tania Candiani’s “Lifeblood”), but the outline of the portal is present.

Here is the poem transcribed, and an audio-only version with Kim speaking:

On being tumbled
Kimberly Arriaga-Gonzalez

Insight is something you’ve been gifted. To see without prompt,

unravel the delicate balance of sandstone on sea. I would say I have seen

kindness in your eyes. See, how this moment

reflects back at me. It was a different sky

not the one thrumming under my skin. It hit [pause] sink me under your calloused touch.

Travel with me against worlds not promised a tomorrow

so the lingering might calm

expectations buzzed at my fingertips. Embody, 

a coming of citrused honey.

To find,

comfort in confession. To split,

carve story  to share.

You spoke of finding inspiration in me in the cantu of my words.

I’m not a person that emotes that feeling. It’s easy to be cruel. Easy to nitpick, be picked at

until you picked me. Mess with me. Mess with me. Call me obsessive.

I ache. [pause]

That night I felt a truth align itself within me. World staring back at us. 

Under that moon, Ocean told us

desháganse. 

Tell me what you mean—

talk of it the way the stars should be interpreted, how godly intervention caresses you how they might manifest in your thoughts.

Could we come undone?

Yes. Who we were and how we morphed. How we existed 

outside of time you walked with me. [short pause]

Walk with me, 

so we might do the things people have been doing since time immemorial.

studio experimentation for NODES…ongoing