SHIFTING BORDERS
★ ★ ★ ★
ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE
‘Change’ by Moitreyee Chowdhury
Earth
We live here. All of us. Crisscrossing this one shared planetary moment. How can we ever understand what we are, where we are, or what we should be in such a blink of time? Instead, we build fences, walls, claim territory, grind her, plough her, mine her, frack her, divide her; claim her, fight over her. We were a trickle that became an infestation, a tickle that became a poison. Do we ever sit still and listen?
100,000 years ago a small group of humans walk out of Africa, spreading over the world in successive migrations. Protean creatures we are, we become smaller, or taller, blonder or develop red, curly hair, straight hair, blue eyes, almond eyes. In the searing sun outback of Australia we kept our colour, but in the North cold sun-starved regions, our color drains, we lose our pigment, but still have all the same roots, are the same tribe.
We forget. We make up stories. Our stories become sacred. We start fighting for these stories that we just made up. When people don’t believe our stories and follow their own we want to kill them.
Restless we are and have always been.
We can unteach what will hurt us.
The bigger-brained Neanderthals were probably our first victims. The first ethnic cleansing. The first indigenous to be absorbed, or colonized, and ultimately destroyed by our expansion.
Regions armed with guns and germs enriched themselves off of the less industrialized.
We are always on the move, crossing mountains, blindly walking through deserts, swimming over oceans, sailing on small ships. Dissatisfied, wanting.
Humans flow over the earth, always a swirling current, now a rising flood. Once again we are on the move; the borders are shifting.
We have a new story to write.
What if neither Europe nor the U.S. needs to remain white?
What if the mass migrations are not the problem?
What if the problem is the war machine that reduced the migrants’ region to rubble?
What if the mothers and their children we have imprisoned for crossing our borders are the ones who came 20,000 years before us?
What if they are home?
What if the people of the South can be let into the North? Just as the people of the North took from the people of the South.
What if the humans from the North looked at the humans from the South and the humans from the East looked at the humans from the West?
What if we all suddenly remembered?
Can we understood how little time we will spend together here? The fragility is stunning. What if we stopped being scared?
* * * *
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. 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.
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.
Artist’s Statement – Susan Leech
As a musician, I find inspiration in events that effect people and communities, both personally and more broadly on a global scale. My work often takes me to remote communities, and puts me in touch with people who are deeply connected to the land. I am fascinated by the culture of the west that tends to remove people from ecology, as though we are somehow not affected by or can stand apart from the changes that occur within our environment. A lot of my songs focus on this disconnect. We are a very transient society—we can move to a place, make money there, raise our children there, but not feel deeply connected to it or compelled to look after it. Most of the people living in the communities I work with are deeply connected to their immediate landscape, and their need to look after their own health and culture is inextricably tied to looking after the lands and waters around them.
I was inspired to write about the refugee crisis partly because of the empathy we feel for people who are forced out of their homes and partly because of the fear and helplessness we feel about having our lives affected by a crisis that is so far away. But the situation also inspires me because—to me, at least—the roots of this crisis and other situations of violence around the world are intimately connected to our continuing drive to stretch our ecological bounds to the breaking point.
Susan is a biologist and a singer/songwriter. While balancing her musical pursuits with her interests in people and conservation, she has written songs that encompass topics ranging from sand dune conservation to the ironies of life in Fort McMurray. She currently works with Indigenous communities in Canada to express and enforce their rights and interests in the face of rapid industrial, environmental, and cultural change.
Musically, Susan has played with her band Exhale in Vancouver, Canada for more than 10 years, focused on singing, harmonica and flute. Most of her musical collaboration is long distance these days, relying heavily on technology and occasional face-to-face weekends in Sechelt, British Columbia. Exhale are currently recording their second edition of the Sechelt Sessions.
Artist Statement – Moitreyee Chowdhury
My work is about the changing landscape. This landscape consists of people, of the land, of criss-cross cultures, the clothes people wear, the way they live. There is no room for judgment; just a fluid, ever-shifting landscape. My painting starts with the European landscape that was relatively structured, evenly laid out, organized. And now people are moving. More and more new elements come in to create a different pattern, changing the landscape. Everything is unsettled. But if we look closely, we will find ourselves in that new landscape. The colors are different, but the element is the same. The same striving for love, family, survival, education, and for life to be settled. This is the time to embrace this new pattern, and create a new harmonious landscape, that is beautiful and colorful. A landscape that has been added to and never diminished.
Moitreyee Chowdhury was born and raised in Delhi, India, and now lives in the USA. After getting a BFA from the College of Arts in Delhi, Moitreyee learned German and did an internship with the Theater Das Tat in Frankfurt, Germany. Circumstances brought her to California, where mentors and artists Paddy Moran and Katie Frank led her to the few years of intensely exploring more materials and thoughts that shaped her creative thinking process. For her art, Moitreyee derives inspiration from her surroundings and the people who are in it. She is motivated by the kindness and compassion of human beings that she sees around the world and hopes to spread the same with her work. You can see more of her work at her website www.moitreyee.com
