NOMEACUERDO LAND
Hair + Nails Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
February 27, 2021 - March 27, 2021
Nomeacuerdo (I-don’t-remember) Land Zine#27
In an event known as the end Permian extinction, roughly 251 million years ago, an estimated 70 percent of land plants and animals died, along with 84 percent of ocean organisms. Memory of life is written in the fossil record by the victims of extinction. Within geologic time, the lifespans of the living are fleeting. One of the oldest beings, found in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains of eastern California, is Methuselah, a bristlecone pine, that is near 5,000 years old. My Ukrainian-Argentinian father is 85 years old, born on the same day that Minneapolitan, George Floyd, at 46 years of age, was killed, May 25, 1935/2020. The pandemic has accentuated human vulnerabilities to climate change. Urbanization and habitat encroachment result in interspecies co-mingling that gives rise to novel coronaviruses. Scientists speak regularly of ecosystem collapse brought on by human reliance on fossil fuels. We are living a time of convergence where climate change is no longer abstract but of consequence in our daily lives. In the preface to “This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation,” Chicana scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa writes,Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement–an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it’s become a sort of “home.” This exhibition offers a reverie about human and non-human relationships and encounters with deep and near time. Time etches the thoughts and memories of ancestors, living and dead, into the strata of the human brain. From 5,500 miles away, my father accompanies me in my travels and craft.Objects, digital prints, and video embody sensory experiences such as: hiking the lava fields of Kilauea Volcano, Volcanoes National Park, Big Island, Hawaii; co-habiting with a Northern flicker at an A-frame, Forest Island Project, Mammoth Lakes, California; following stray dogs performing non-human allyship with human protesters, Concepción, Chile; welding and weaving an Acapulco chair, the outcome of a YouTube, how-to-video uploaded by Mexican fabricator, José Ríos.