What is Your name? Say it again is a conceptual experimentation that reflects on the feelings that come from the experience of being repeatedly addressed or categorized as an outsider. This experience extends beyond my time living in the U.S., to the country where I was born and raised, Chile. Forced into cultural assimilation and the embracement of an homogenizing Chilean national identity, I was raised to forget and reject my Mapuche heritage. The frequent request for repetition of my last name has become a powerful exercise of memory to remind me who I am, where I come from as transmotion, counter-movement, and multiple diaspora.
What is your name? Say it again (2018), pigment print, 48” x 17” (122 x 43 cm.)
Juror’s choice at Language and Letters, San Francisco Women Artists Gallery, 2019
(detail)
A digital collage that combines Mapuche textile imagery with subtly interwoven text in the background. The warming feeling encoded in the wool textile contrasts with the text, which is obscured by the digital weaving, and displays a question and request, repeated ad infinitum, What is your name? Say it again.
