December 17, 2013
After several years of intensive incubation, my new longterm body of work called OUT HERE DEATH IS NO BIG DEAL launches on December 1st, when my team and I begin our fieldwork along the US-Mexico border.
There is a lot more detail about the project on the website: www.OutHereDeathIsNoBigDeal.com including the expanding team of artists and advisors that reaches across astronomy, geology, shamanism, human rights, and various other fields of expertise. It’s anticipated to be a three-year project, with regularly shared selections of work in performance, exhibition, and publication, beginning this winter in NYC.
OUT HERE DEATH IS NO BIG DEAL investigates the dichotomy between the bodies of women in the earth (contemporary femicide grave sites), and the bodies of women in the cosmos (archeo-astronomical observatory sites). It questions the human mythologies that have defined women’s bodies as either sacred or profane. It condemns the so-called “justice system” that actively opposes equal access to equal rights and protections for women and girls. Instead, it offers a third, near-future reality in which women’s existences are self-defined, equal, and liberated:
Like me, many people who live/d along the U.S.-Mexico border discover themselves caught up in a peculiar intersection of geopolitical violence, existential explorations, and the intimate personal consequences of both. Starting in my adolescence and continuing for decades, I began navigating my own experience of these intersections in Northern Mexico, South Texas, New Mexico, Southern Arizona, the desert borderlands of Southern California, and several Native/tribal Nations.
While living in a progression of utopian – and dystopian – borderland subcultures, I became a small part of various efforts to address the repercussions of violent conflict in the deserts of the Southwest, and the deserts of the Middle East, since many soldiers returned from combat to inhabit the military bases and training sites, GI-Billed state universities, and Veterans Administration hospitals that are so plentiful throughout the border region.
OUT HERE is deeply invested in these lives and experiences, in particular those I lived – and lived amidst – during many iterations of my life. For a time, I helped set up shelters and safe houses for a group of people who should be called gender crimes refugees, but were often just called women, wives, daughters, mothers, queers, prostitutes… At the safe houses, our youngest survivors were newborns. Behind the secret walls, stories and wounds revealed human cruelty on a level of complexity and barbarity that I found devastating to comprehend even while I bore witness, and experienced impacts and echoes and ricochets of that violence in my own life.
Over time, the differences between the lives of the “helpers” and the “helped” merged into a continuum of female and gendered and sexual experience that I had not – previously – entirely conceptualized. The omnipresent threat of retaliative violence, security concerns, the constant imposition of silencing, secrecy, and confidentiality, and the flagrant misogyny in the justice system underscored the degree of power that men and male perpetrators maintained at all levels of society. The messianic, exploitative zeal of whiteness, straightness, wealth, power, and colonial imperialism further influence, escalate, and exacerbate the volatility. And likewise, the nearly always wrongly-placed authority and control of law enforcement.
Several years later, I am beginning to excavate, resurrect, and re-animate the lives we have led there, one story at a time.