Beyond the Whiteness of Spaces: Finding Phenomenology, Race, and Queerness in Bricolaje
“The alignment of race and space is crucial to how they materialize as givens, as if
each “extends” the other. In other words, while “the other side of the world” is associate
with “racial otherness,” racial others become associated with the “other side of the
world.” They come to embody distance. This embodiment of distance is what makes
whiteness “proximate” as the “starting point” for orientation. Whiteness becomes what
is “here,” a line from which the world unfolds, which also makes what is “there” on “the
other side.”
(Ahmed, 2006, 121)
The sheet of paper starts white, offering a space for your marks. The white frame offers to
encase your object, simply and cleanly. The walls of the gallery are painted white, offering to
present your work free from distraction. White is the often-thought object of our desire due to
its ubiquity. The preciousness of the object “here” and “within reach” can even cause those
craving whiteness to go to great lengths to keep it as white as possible. Keeping a surface
clean requires care and attention, an expectation capable of causing anxiety. However, to
follow Sara Ahmed’s own line of questioning, I am curious about the turn away from or
against white space to one situated “over there” and beyond.
The artists featured in the group exhibition Bricolaje redirect us from whiteness. Curated by
C.J. Charbonneau and Narciso Argüelles, each object has a story, shaped by an experience
not here–quite literally, by experiences not white. The show addresses the ongoing
immigration crisis and the narratives that dictate what we see and know, giving us a new
point to consider. Through the artists’ stories articulating their existence as Mexican and
Mexican-American, the audience is reoriented towards them. We are elsewhere. Looking at
three of its artists, the experience of being lost–feeling not “here” but rather “over there”–is
the starting point. They are concerned with the body finding its way. They have not always
been here.
From left to right, Marrakech and Teotilán Del Valle by Patricia Bordallo Dibildox. Photo by Silvia Beatriz Abisaab.
Patricia Bordallo Dibildox shows us her own body in a shifting state of willful submission to
the spaces she occupies. In her self-portrait photographs, we are shown what it looks like to
lose one’s way. Her body is not-quite grounded, impacted by the space she is inhabiting. In
her photos, Dibildox extends, stretches, and strains her body to make contact with the world
around her. She is trying to make sense of it all. Her body is turned away, to something “over
there.” The emotional gestures feel like her own attempts to mend the disorientation.
Dibildox is not alone either. Her work in the show is a collaboration with her mother who
contributed to the surface of the frames for her photographs. Using repujado, or embossing
techniques on aluminum, her frames turn us to the surfaces often found in churches–a
tradition resulting from European colonization in Mexico. Beyond ornamentation inside the
church, the metal covered the wooden supports to protect it from the candle flames nearby.
The subject of this protection has shifted however, from the church to the gallery space.
Here, mother protects daughter.
If traversing white space can leave a person lost, how might they find their way? What maps
could help? Maps themselves direct us to this point and that point, laying out a particular
recorded history. And crucially, they can point us to where we are.
Untitled by Fidencio Fifield-Perez. Photo by Silvia Beatriz Abisaab.
Fidencio Fifield-Perez uses maps to illustrate the methods used to domesticate and detail
where we are, where we might be, or where we could go. Maps are a snapshot, a document,
a moment recorded. They archive space, body, and time. The lines maps present to us tell
their stories of what William Kentridge refers to as “the X-point of pressure,” showing us past,
present, and future of a particular place (Kentridge, 2014, 72-3). Fifield-Perez explores this
facet of the map-as-document and the inclination to follow these lines. The lines we are
analyzing in this case are stories of others and the mental maps of immigrants attempting to
find home.
It is no coincidence either that there is another type of line present on these maps. In
referencing Kentridge’s idea of the pressurized point, the point within the X, Fifield-Perez’s
maps also reminds us of the limitations signified by the X. We’re reminded to stop, to halt, to
not cross this line. In his ne installations, such as “Portrait/Patrol,” we are simultaneously
reminded of who can move through spaces and who cannot. They are about the failures
others face navigating whiteness. In the same manner as Dibildox’s photographs, Perez
presents us the pressurized points of discomfort and one’s desires to find place–to call
home.
As we move away from the limiting object of the net in the gallery, we notice the whiteness of
the space itself. I move across the space and encounter something white, something also
familiar: clothing worn by the body. Or is it? Something is off and eerily so. The objects here
in this part of the gallery space, are plaster-coated and made white, like a white sheet draped
over a body. In the strange, altered archives presented by Rodolfo Marron III, we are
reminded of the potential spirits moving through our spaces and the evidence of their
existence.
Mi Camisa, Su Gorra, y El Rosario de Alguien, by Rodolfo Marron III. Photo by Silvia Beatriz Abisaab.
As Ahmed states, “the familiar is ‘extended’ by differentiating itself from the strange, by
making what seems strange ‘just about’ familiar, or by transforming ‘what is strange’ into an
instrument.” (Ahmed, 2006, 117) This inclination to merge familiar and strange is natural to
Marron. His marks guide us through historic and emotive worlds of collectives who may have
never felt present. In this instance though, they are not the entirely lost ghosts. Instead, we
get lost in Marron’s mediation. These spirits are revived, a transformation moving them from
their world to ours.
We cannot help but recognize the presence of the Mexican bodies who occupy the works in
Bricolaje. While they are stories about traumas, I can’t help but think of the ways they mend.
How can we delimit the spaces we move through? What is possible? The past in all three
artists’ works point towards what José Esteban Muñoz refers to in his book Cruising Utopia
as the utopian “then.” We see traditions, devices, cultures, and methods–beautiful archives
in suspended states. The ordinary haunts each object, remaining present in the space.
Together, they reshape our world into one of empathy and possibility. So if there a “then”,
what utopian “there” exists beyond the space of this gallery?In its original definition, to be
queer was to be weird or strange. Like its current definition, queerness has morphed and
changed–it has resisted being fixed and familiar. And certainly the works tell their story from
the positions of the stranger. From their queered positions, the artists are each attempting to
find their way and articulate their various states of existence. They are mediators of
empathetic possibilities. Queerness within spaces has the ability to reshape and remake
them. As Ahmed suggests in the quote at the start of this essay, whiteness is here,
enveloping us. The works by Dibildox, Fifield-Perez, and Marron refer to the white expected
of an authority, a gallery space, frame, paper, or body. However, their materials are charged,
colored by the experiences and histories of marginalized bodies not always here. We need to
see beyond white spaces to find the affective potentials offered by spaces. In Bricolaje, the
artists are confidently here showing a world over there.
WORKS CITED
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke
University Press. 2006
Kentridge, William. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2014
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York:
New York University Press. 2009