Where’s the Rest of Me

For the past 4 years, I have been deeply influenced by Brian Massumi's second chapter, "The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image," from his book Parables for the Virtual. In this chapter Massumi analyzes Ronald Reagan's iconic scene in King’s Row, where he plays a handsome man who experiences a life-altering accident. My art practice has been affected by the role of this young man who wakes up to having his bottom half amputated. Reagan prepared for months to deliver the character’s pivotal line, “Where’s the rest of me?” I still repeat this famous line, and subsequently, the title of his autobiography, and its ghostly impression is a conceptual framework I use to explore the relationship between the virtual and the real in my multidisciplinary practice. Drawing on various media, from painting to film, my work investigates the traces of affect on identity through technology and archival material, aiming to challenge the stories we tell about ourselves and exploring my own double identity.

The elusive nature of identity and the constant negotiation between the virtual and the real, has been a driving force in my work and iterations of this question “Who am I?” constantly surface in my practice. In 2015, I became aware of my alter-ego, Griselda, an indignant iconoclast and at times, insecure artist. By adopting the trickster figure as a methodology, I established a character that drew upon the disruptive and alchemical qualities inherent to this archetype to challenge my own preconceived notions about identity and representation. I created my first short film, Griselda (2018-2020), and through this process, I discovered that she embodied a contemporary trickster figure, grappling with the paradoxical nature of these two themes by being both object and subject. Simultaneously, drawing on Melanie Klein and Hanna Segal’s psychoanalytic theories of paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, Griselda morphed into a personal method for reparation, an object to split off and to fill with what I couldn’t handle. By creating a memory or an object or a person to be free, I hoped to allow those outside concepts to live and restore each other on their own. 

As a project-based artist, my research is rooted in autobiography. I am interested in recreating emotional encounters in order to better understand and navigate my experiences as a gendered and racialized subject. Before entering my MFA studies at Columbia University, I knew I would create a film about Griselda. I initiated the project by staging 30 eccentric dates that I had experienced between 2016 and 2019, employing actors to reenact them (Audition #4/39, 2021). But as COVID-19 began taking over, my feelings about Griselda began to change. I found myself going soft. I kept returning to Massumi’s chapter, especially when I began to edit the footage that I produced in 2020 during the height of the pandemic (Cry with Me: Variations, 2021). In the chapter, we learn that Reagan had a disdain for seeing himself on the screen, an unhappiness and an unfulfillment. Instead of seeing his character or role, he still saw himself, and he argued, a full commitment to the character would require him to be unrecognizable to himself. 

If you genuinely transform into another person, someone so distinct from your true self that your original identity vanishes, is it possible to return to who you once were? Can you feel your fundamental difference? I encountered these questions while editing the footage. I still saw myself, and in fact, I realized I had created a person to attack, and inadvertently, a situation where it was okay to edit myself. I discovered Catherine Malabou’s work, Ontology of the Accident and found a key to my metamorphosis, “The body can die without being dead. There is a destructive mutation that is not the transformation of the body into a cadaver, but rather the transformation of the body into another body in the same body, due to an accident, a lesion, an injury, or a catastrophe” (Malabou 34). I turned to home video footage I had been collecting from my family’s basement, searching for answers to confront the deep ambiguities in my family and the implication of splitting off from yourself. Editing this footage, I was forgiving, I could see the young still-a-girl child who nothing had happened to and the brother that was still around. I craved a genuine narrator or symbolic truth and started to create narrations next to the archival footage. For A Shapeshifter with a Heavenly Secret (2021) I wrote, “I think splitting is more like when you cut yourself but don’t notice until you see the blood on a piece of paper or on your jeans. Sometimes you only notice the cut after it's scabbed over. A little thin hard line. Or maybe it’s like when your gums bleed on an apple. Who created the wound? I used to think healing was for losers.” I realized I had learned this from my brother, that potentially one could split and never even notice it had happened. My interest in Klein’s theories became clearer; I am interested in her philosophy because it gives agency to the child, they are powerful creators and destroyers with the desperate need to repair their family’s mourning.

Around this time, I began painting again. I started with research on three steles from Chavín de Hauntar, Peru ca. 800-500 BC that became the theoretical framework for the diptych Así Volvemos (2020). I combined these steles with photographs of Salvadoran prisoners that I found in 2020 in the gossip magazine, The Daily Mail. Sandwiched between advertisements and gossip columns in an article titled, “At least they are wearing masks!” I found their context uncanny. The prisoners were morally interstitial, incarcerated humans but gang members at the same time. With painting I added a dimension of touch and created metafictions like my films. Instead of virtual caricatures, these people could be fierce gods in another reality. My work investigates these very traces of affect on identity through the dissemination of images depicting dehumanization across various media and throughout history. I am interested in the interstitial site born from the outward projection of a fragment of the collective self. 

The trickster figure, the disrupter and the catalyst for change, is the role I take on while examining this research and reorganizing and manipulating my family’s pre-existing collections. Within all of this, I think of my practice as anti-identity, the embodiment of neither and many representations. With this position, I aim to disrupt and complicate the traditional gendered narratives of immigration stories and use affect to harness and create transformative experiences for both the viewer and the performer. I’ve started translating my grandmother, Anita’s, own autobiography about her departure from El Salvador in 1976 and 1980. She crossed the US border and memorized the route from El Salvador, which enabled her to embark on this journey once more in 1980 and rescue an additional eight people. This double return is actually one juncture of a generational story of migration that extends to Russia and Germany and leads to the story being told by a non-binary trickster, which is in itself another return to pre-colonialism. I’ve decided to combine unreleased footage from Cry with Me in 2020 with new footage of my grandmother I’ve been recording with my Panasonic OmniMovie, the same model my dad had in the 90s. 

In many ways, my education was cut short at Columbia due to the pandemic, and in others, it allowed me to challenge the original ideas about my work and take more conceptual risks. Still, I crave a well-rounded educational experience and I recognize this questioning of what could have been in Andre Breton’s first paragraph of Nadja, “Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt’...Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am (Breton 11).” It’s as if just asking the question puts a wedge between who you are and who you were before you asked. I’m not interested in the question nor the answer but the gap made from asking, and what filters into the space created. 

Bibliography

Breton, André. Nadja. Translated by Richard Howard, Grove Press, 1988.

Malabou, Catherine. The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Translated by Carolyn Shread, Wiley, 2012.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Edited by Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson, Duke University Press, 2002.