BORDER CROSSINGS
★ ★ ★ ★
ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE – SHIFTING BORDERS
We are all migrants
Once upon a time
100,000 years ago
A small group of humans walk out of Africa:
We spread over the world.
Protean creatures,
Searching for scarce light,
Sun-starved, our color drains,
We lose pigment,
In the searing sun we keep our color,
In the East our eyes become almonds,
In the dark North our brown eyes become blue,
We forget.
We make up stories.
Our stories become sacred.
We fight for these stories
We kill for them
There is a new story yet to be written
We can unteach what will hurt us.
We can remember.
Detention as deterrence
The mothers and their children
Imprisoned for crossing our borders
Came here
20,000 years before us
They are home.
La detención como disuasión
Las madres y sus hijos
Encarcelados por cruzar nuestras fronteras
Vinieron
20,000 años antes que nosotros
Ellos están en casa
★ ★ ★ ★
Family Detention
Along our border
Imprisoned women with their children
In private for-profit Institutions
That the government promises to keep full
Have committed one crime,
the usual crime—they are poor,
they had hope,
they had courage.
Detención familiar
A lo largo de nuestra frontera
Mujeres presas con sus hijos
En instituciones con fines de lucro privadas
Las cuales el gobierno se compromete a mantener llenas
Han cometido un solo crimen,
El crimen común—son pobres,
Tenían esperanza.
Tenían valor.
White Delusion
A pigment mutation
Kept us alive without light,
In the dark our eyes turned blue.
But we have come back to the lands of the sun;
Our whiteness
Dangerous.
Colonialization leads to migration
The people of the North took from the people of the South.
The people of the South are coming to the North.
The people of the West took from the people of the East.
The people of the East are coming to the West.
What if we all suddenly remembered?
What if we stopped being scared?
La colonización conduce a la migración
La gente del norte tomó de la gente del sur
La gente del sur está llegando al norte
La gente del oeste tomó de la gente del este
La gente del este está llegando al oeste
¿Y si de repente todos recordáramos?
¿Y si dejamos de estar asustados?
Not Native American
Who was America?
Some Italian adventurer?
Why did he get the whole shebang named after him?
My friend Gary Whitedear is a Choctaw,
He tells me
– I’m not Native American
I was here before America
America is not where I’m from
America happened to me.
When my car stalls he turns to tell me
“You have Injun trouble.”
Artist Statement – Alka Raghuram
I paint and make films to tell my stories and interpret the stories of others. I am an immigrant. I grew up in India and now live in America. The process of moving homes is also a process of becoming, of re-forming, of leaving the past and imagining a new story for yourself, that becomes a map for the future.
When I read stories of people fleeing their land and homes, of forced migrations, of refugees, my most intimate access to their experience is through evoking my own, and building on it with the published details of their lives. I imagine their stories, the pain, the horror, the helplessness, and the hope. It is this merging of self with the other that my paintings Self Portraits With Masks, Mermaids and Memory try to capture.
And in this spirit, I’d like to invite the viewers to imagine themselves with the masks and share their responses, any story, personal, from the news, fictional or imagined, that come to mind.
www.junoonpictures.com/junoonpictures@gmail.com
Alka Raghuram is a filmmaker and a multidisciplinary artist who just finished a feature documentary, Burqa Boxers, about Muslim women boxers in Kolkata India. Burqa Boxers was developed with the support of ITVS’ Diversity Development Fund. It was invited to the Open Doors co-production market at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland in 2011 where it was awarded the top prize Grant Open Doors.
In 2012 Alka created a photo, video and art installation based on the project at the Locarno Film Festival. The project is partly funded by CNC, France.
In September 2014, Alka collaborated with dancers Pandit Chitresh Das (Indian, Kathak) and Antonio Hidalgo Paz (Flamenco) to create video vignettes for their performance Yatra (Journey) comprising of poetry, photography, painting and calligraphy about the historical connection between the two dance forms. The performance premiered at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.
Her fiction script “The Conqueror” was invited to Berlin Talent Project Market in 2008, and also Tribeca All Access, where Alka was awarded the L’Oreal Woman of Worth Vision Filmmaker Award.
Alka’s short films Tired of Dancing, Panchali and The Ant and The Monkey have screened at various festivals in the US and abroad. Panchali received the John Gutman award for innovation in cinema and was a regional finalist in the Student Academy Awards (2004). The Ant and The Monkey received the Emerging Arts Fund in Spring 2006 from The Peninsula Community Foundation, and was nominated for the Princess Grace Award in 2005. Her paintings have been exhibited in galleries and Museums in New York.
#Shiftingborders
Alka and I met in film school at the beginning of this century and became friends from first conversation. Over the years we have worked on each other’s projects and are both trusted editors of each other’s work. As part of our artists in residence month at The Wild Word Earth Issue we decided to do a collaborative set of paintings and poems addressing the issue of borders and migrations.
Our group works from the Bay Area in California, a privileged place at the edge of a giant continent that claims to police the world. We just had a show highlighting the Syrian refugee crisis. We also have a border just to the south where 60,000 migrant families arrived at the Southwest Border during the summer and fall of 2014. So the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rapidly expanded centers of detention. It was a thought-out policy called “detention as deterrence.” This is contrary to international law. Now along the borders we have imprisoned women with their children without even assessing their claims. It is the largest incarceration of families since the notorious Japanese internment camps. They have no rights. They have no ability to leave. They have committed one crime, the usual crime—they are poor, and their governments will not protect or provide for them. They, like many humans before them, migrated looking for a better life. These issues among others, environmental borders, personal borders, are ones we focus on in our individual work.
Here is a link to find out more about this issue. https://grassrootsleadership.org/reports/profit-family-detention-meet-private-prison-corporations-making-millions-locking-refugee
Our group #shiftingborders is a diverse and fluctuating group of artists who all migrated to Silicon Valley because of the opportunities offered in the high-tech industry to our partners or ourselves. We all work in different mediums and believe different things. We are very happy this month to share our work with The Wild Word, a new magazine dedicated to excellence in art and committed to the same core beliefs as ourselves. Because if we share one core belief, it is that art is more powerful when it means something, when it addresses social injustice, and when it attempts to explore the crisis and strain our planet is under.
Emer Martin
California June, 10th 2016
Emer Martin is an Irish novelist, painter and filmmaker who has also lived in Paris, London, the Middle East, and the United States. Her first novel, Breakfast in Babylon won Book of the Year at the 1996 Listowel Writers’ Week. More Bread Or I’ll Appear, her second novel, was published internationally in 1999. Baby Zero was published in March 2007 and released internationally through the publishing co-operative Rawmeash based in the Bay Area California. Why is the Moon following Me? is her first children’s book.
She studied painting in New York and graduated from the Thomas Hunter Honors Program of Hunter College as class valedictorian in January 1998. She had two sell-out solo shows of her paintings at the Origin Gallery in Harcourt St, Dublin. She recently completed her third short film Unaccompanied. She produced Irvine Welsh’s directorial debut NUTS in 2007. She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. Her new children’s book The Pooka will be released this Halloween 2016. Her fourth novel The Cruelty Men will be released in Ireland and the UK in 2017. She now lives in Palo Alto, California.
Translations of the poems are by Yesica López.
Yesica López was born in Oaxaca, Mexico. She is currently pursuing a teaching credential in SJSU. She lives in San Jose with her husband and three children. She believes strongly in education and building communities committed to social justice.
For more on the work of Shifting Borders
