Mi Tiempo, Mein Raum, My Map: Becoming a Serial Migrant
The participation in the different chapters of the Moving Matters Traveling Workshop has changed my art and my thoughts about my life. I am an artist, and a serial migrant. For many years I have been dealing with migration and displacement in my art. My experience of living in four different countries dealing with different cultures and languages, gave me the capacity to observe and compare, make decisions, be flexible as an outsider, yet paradoxically feel included. And yet, I often explored migration as fragmentation and being torn between two places in my art. Thinking about how multiple experiences of being an immigrant shaped me, and the company of other artists with similar experience has been transformative.
Working with the moving matters workshop enabled me to find new concepts for understanding my life and making art based on new ways of telling my story. For instance, in Mi Tiempo Mein Raum, My Map, I explore the transformation of the girl Beatriz growing up in a close family circle, to the Serial Migrant Beatriz following her love “Peter” to Germany, then back to Columbia, to the USA to Mexico and then to the USA where I live today.
In this performance, I walk on a canvas on which I’ve written the names of people I met during my life. The names are written in circles that represent the different countries where I have lived. It is a kind of personal map. The process of recollection while drawing the canvas helped me to understand interconnections in my paths, and how these names shaped my journey and gave sense to my life.
I trace the times of my life in the performance by calling out the names as I trace the line of my journey across the canvas using a red ribbon. I became an emigrant by love, and this love transformed me in an immigrant and then, a serial migrant. The “red string of fate” is a reference to the traditional Chinese “red string of marriage”. The two people connected by the red thread are destined lovers, regardless of place, time, or circumstances. This magical cord may stretch or entangle, but never break. The name of my husband, Peter, becomes a leitmotif in the performance. When I shift from one circle/country to another, it is always while calling out his name. Many people ask what motivates migrants to move: in my case it was my love for an adventurous man that led me o become flexible and adapt to new environments.
I was very nervous when I first presented this very intimate performance as part of the MMTW in California. The performance was well received in Riverside and Los Angeles, and grew a lot when the MMTW went to Clichy, France, where I knew no one and did not speak the language. There, in the large, elaborate hall of the Pavillon Vendome art center, (pictured below) I allowed me to feel free to become the performer they expected and that was inside of me, clamoring for an outlet for expression. I felt and took the freedom of anonymity; I was ready to fulfill the audience expectation and received a strong connection and interaction. In each new place I have taken the performed since, I have adapted the performance to the place. The interaction with its each particular audience inspired me in different ways. For instance, in Berlin, I was again in one of my “homes” and this led to new thoughts and ways of interpreting the script of names.
After the experience of developing this performance, I decided to travel back to revisit my homes in Germany and Colombia to see how the places evoked memories and led me to reconnect to people. This led to further works of art in the context of the MMTW; more on that work in my next article.
