ARCHIVE OF EMBODIED MISPLACEMENT
In previous iterations of the archive, I entitled it “Archive of Embodied Displacement”. Through time, research and conversations, I understood that my history is not one of displacement but misplacement. While still a subject from the Global South impacted by imperial colonialism, I have not experienced direct displacement like many other Indigenous nations in “Mexico” have. I do, however, keep embodying the many hoops and traps of the immigration system in “Canada” –a fact that unsettles the possibility of belonging.
This archive is a conversation between the book Through Newfoundland with the Camera, published over 100 years ago, and my gestures as a Latin American diaspora currently living in the territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations also known as “Vancouver, BC”. These still images, performances, and writing conjures a space and time that refuses to settle into homogeneity. This archive defends that the nuances of nationhood and belonging to shifting territories exist in the form of “diasporic gestures”, actions to ground ourselves in the current land we are inhabiting. Weaving together spaces and narratives of the “Canadian” East and West Coast, I aim to claim some agency over my own history, a shared history of immigration, misplacement, and awakening trust.
On barnacles: Walking along the coastline of Point Grey in Vancouver, I pick up a shell filled with barnacles. Barnacles are marine arthropods living in shallow waters attaching to any surface in tidal zones. Trying to find a place to live, they usually weigh down ships, making watercrafts’ travel times longer. Barnacles can also be found in whales, rocks, and adrift pieces of wood. They are crustaceans promoting grounding ashore, instigating slowness. I pick up the rock, observe these creatures in detail and leave it with millimetric precision where it was almost as if someone or something were watching, making sure both the rock and I were exactly where we are supposed to be. The rock with barnacles belongs in Point Grey, for now, I belong somewhere in relation to it.