Migrant Kinship: Thoughts on the latest meeting of the Moving Matters Workshop
The Moving Matters Traveling Workshop (http://movingmattersworkshops.ucr.edu/) explores migration and mobility by developing artwork, exhibitions, performances and public interventions. The artists of the MMTW have all been immigrants multiple times. Although they were born and have lived in different countries and speak diverse languages, they share the experience of “serial migration.” In March 2016, the MMTW held a seminar, exhibition and performance showing their work at UC Riverside. These are some of the thoughts I had regarding talks/performances in my commentary.
March 13: second day of MMTW meeting
I would like to respond to the three performances as well as what has unfolded since yesterday morning — both on and offline, both in exile and at home, both prehistoric and digital.
The theme of this session is MIGRATION — SERIAL, IMPOSSIBLE, VIRTUAL. I want to connect the three presentations to each other and to the larger discussion by saying that our body is an archive. Our memory is also an archive. Our body, our mind, our psyche are mastery that also enables other forms of masteries, such as the mastery of virtual encounters. The virtual is real because it stirs all the visceral emotions and fear in us — the feelings are real when we are captured by the militia in a video game.
WE
But first, a disclaimer: I want to be careful with the word ‘we’ — because it is problematic and can shroud dis-consent and differences. But for lack of a better word to refer to those who are present at this Workshop, I use the word ‘we’ with all its slippages and constraints.
We push the boundaries, we push our memories, we push our bodies. We forge a sense of togetherness without suggesting unity. We embrace divergence and acknowledge some sharedness.
LANGUAGES
We use different languages: our bodies, our memories, our mother tongues and second and third tongues, our emotions, the maps, the markers, gestures, flame, shoes, clothes, silence, voices, movement and stillness.
We re-enact the past. We transform our memories. We enter each other’s pain — and please let me stress, also joy — to unpack this seminal thing call the human experiences. We try to reconnect with ourselves, to be in touch with our own experiences.
Yet memories live on slippery ground — and they might disappear. Last night, several us working on the map kept saying: I couldn’t believe I forgot about this place or that experience.
IMPOSSIBILITY
But is it really possible to recall and to re-enact? Who the hell can say: I have totaled my migration experiences in this work or that novel or that play? What wishful thinking!
And I think for that very reason — and thanks to Susan’s vision and consistence — that the Moving Matters Workshop keeps taking on new forms, new issues, new expressions, new transformations.
We are doing the impossible. Even when we encounter another person’s memories through bodily enactments, we are still only seeing — until we choose to be thinking and feeling and letting go into the performers’ psyche and bodies.
But still, we are all different. Our bodies are different. So we try. And words deceive us. Gestures trick us. And we continue to count on them to help us understand ourselves and each other.
So the impossibility remains — but that’s the beauty of life. We can only come so close to our own memory — and others’ memories. Like the asymptote — reaching so close to the axis, but never quite touching it.
RADICAL INTIMACY
I have come to experience in this Workshop a kind of open-ended, organic, flexible kinship. You can call it the serial migrant kinship, the memory kinship, the moving matters kinship — however you so please.
We have also come into what I would call a radical intimacy — we release our thoughts and feelings to absolute strangers (and some acquaintances), we dare to disclose our deepest thoughts. By doing that, we set part of ourselves free.
To keep moving.