Edward Said wrote about the contrapuntal as a palimpsest of two things at once; the exile who embodies a plurality of place. Similarly, I exist within a multiplicity of borders, though now I refer to my own gender. I use Said’s image of the exile as a way to frame my trans identity within the larger diasporic narrative of my family.
This took form in my installation where I cast the backs of friends who have a relationship to migration - either by may of immigration or through gender expression. I then abstracted their body molds using sand and cast them in concrete. The outcomes are sculptural body casts that display a map of displacement across the concrete gallery floor, each back resisting, making their own wave in a sea of many.
These sculptures were accompanied by a mural print of my grandfather swimming, possibly the Atlantic, possibly the Mediterranean, probably the 1930s. immersed within a sea of no borders, a floating head, a body implied. a disembodiment of possibility. (mural sized, hung low so the bottom of the sea bends onto the floor)
i. name
I changed my name twelve years ago this March. I adopted my father’s name, Andres, which was also my grandfather’s name, except my grandfather used an accent so it was written as Andrés, then I removed the “s”. My birth name began with an “S” and I felt I had had enough of that and with it’s removal, it positioned me in-between the male Andrés, or Andres, and the female Andrea, a name that, to me, signifies constant becoming.
2 letters from my father (handwritten and typed, otherwise identical, to be hung on wall):
My great grandfather's first name was Antranik that sounds and probably is Andres in Spanish. His son, my grandfather, was therefore also named Antranik although because of social decor in Argentina was Andres from the beginning. And I was also named Andres but also had a middle name, Hugo and was never known as Andres but Hugo. I came back after I emigrated to the US where to my chagrin I was also known as Andy.
But the worst offense against our identity was the so called abbreviation of the last name of the entire family by the surprised custom agents who greeted them upon their arrival to their new country, from Kachichian to Keichian easier to
pronounce in a language with an entire different alphabet than the Armenian.
You were baptized, and I must clarify that we did not suffer from religious confusion because we all are Catholic whatever it means, as Stephanie Joan Keichian. I do not know if you thought Joan was for the crucified Joan of Arc but for a strange reason you adopted the French name Andre that means Andres in
Spanish and probably Antranik in Armenian. It was probably an ancestral impulse to reach my ancestors in an elegant way although it is true that my grandfather was educated in a French School although it was in Lebanon that at that tim was controlled by France.
ii. place
a photograph of my grandfather swimming, possibly the Atlantic, possibly the Mediterranean, probably the 1930s. immersed within a sea of no borders, a floatin head, a body implied. a disembodiment of possibility. (mural sized, hung low so the bottom of the sea bends onto the floor)
Going to America at that time was a source of hope, you know. You don’t know what they knew, they knew some letters of some people who came and I don’t know how those letters would end up at that time came from South America to Middle East. It may take months probably to get there on ship and then, that was
something. That was the history of immigrants of that time. There were ships, there were nothing else. It was like going to the unknown and knowing sometimes that it was forever probably because you wouldn’t go back, no chance. They never went back, they never had a chance to go back they were working hard and going back, when you take a trip like that you don’t know if you’re going to survive or what. I know my grandmother, there was an epidemic on the ship, yellow fever or something like that, and they wouldn’t allow the ship to get into the port of Brazil in Rio because of the illness and they used to throw the bodies to the sea, the dead bodies. And you wonder how they survived, those who survived. We don’t know why we are here, we could have been nonexistent or whatever.
iii. time
castings of backs, a living archive of kinship, rendered in fine concrete (placed throughout the space, emerging from concrete floor, direct lighting)
a letter to my collaborators:
this is not a single body but many bodies.
they do not offer an unveiling of anatomy; instead they make visible their own hiding.
they are genderless, they have no color, no classification.
they speak to difference without differentiating.
hard and heavy, lying down like animals, they carry their own weight.
backs are illegal, backs migrate. their curves like waves, they move.
debris, dust, fragmentation.
they are strong, they work, they become sore, they sometimes break, these backs are precarious, these backs are cared for.