notes on paper
Sunbathing at the edge of the tongue is a continuation of my material and theoretical exploration of paper. Currently taking the form of an oversized jersey barrier, the paper comes from people in my community in West Philadelphia. In its original state, the paper serves as a record of a life, and of death: a woman gives me a bag of shredded documents from her dying mother, it's a preparation -- she won’t need those anymore. I take the paper and I blend it all together. That life is shredded with mine and we mesh together into a new one. The form of the jersey barrier is used here to reference the many different ways that power and the delineation of spaces function: in protests, to protect the statues/buildings/police; at the border, to deny refuge to those walking from South and Central America; in war zones, in highways and in many other places, the jersey barrier marks a line that is not to be crossed. I’m not interested in the binary of the barrier (here and there), but in the potential for freedom and movement in the space inside the line it marks.
I have been using paper as material because of its ability to fall apart and come back together again and again. So far, I have chosen to not add any binding agents to my paper making process. This lets me reuse my paper fibers multiple times by just crumbling it in water, each time recognizing that it has gained new information and new stories. Each time I make a new sheet of paper, I’m reminded that this process of blending, mashing, and meshing has already happened. Time becomes less linear and I see the potentiality for all stories coming together.
Paper has become a perfect material to represent the travesti framework of Greyness that I have been developing for the last two years. I am thinking of this queer theoretical system as a proposal for liberation for all. I ground my research in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Marlene Wayar, José Esteban Muñoz, Daisy Hildyard, but most of all, it is through my trans and queer friends, artists and organizers that this work and concept has come to life. What follows is an excerpt of the text I have been developing. (I add it here because it feels crucial to share that this theory is as much sculpture as material and form are):
“Taking into consideration Wayar’s work on travesti-trans Latin American teoria, I situate the greyness analytic in the space of a shared nostredad and of being in multiple times. The grey nostredad is a recognition of all the other stories before me and the world at large. Like paper, we exist together, in each other’s stories and above sharp blades. We have already died and we are already something Other. Like this paper, we also exist here, now, then. In a time that is never backward or forward but simply another point. We as fragments exist there and then, right now. We, as fragments, already exist not in three points but in every point. We live in Wayar’s gerund, estamos siendo. Without fixing, there is instability, but we live in an unstable world, and to categorize it is to destroy it.“
I am using the material of paper and theory together with the form of sculpture, to envision a new way of being: the barrier is my representation of nostredad (loosely translated to “us-ness / we-ness”), this nostredad is my proposal for social change and liberation. A new form of understanding the world by being everywhere, complicit in the Evils of the world and also hurt by them; it is a travesti sculpture, one that makes itself with the discarded materials of society, one that reinvents itself over and over, and one that is made with love and care.
