Happenings
Happenings consist on an art installation and three wearable sculptures. The installation "Happanings in the Land" I am questioning what we preserve by casting the water pools in bronze and juxtaposing them with receipts and other documentation I have archived. In this installation, I use the paper maché technique, including the receipts, to enframe the installation as a regime of spatial confinement. I want to convey the structure of power and control over the land and people by creating trajectories in the Installation (Mitchell 42-46). These trajectories exemplify the subjective conception of my racialized experience in the public space by walking myself surrounded by the installation. The interaction with the installation is to reveal the happenings by wearing away the layers of paper. This microclimate I created with the installation reflects the experience of the happenings in Mexico City, Toronto and the river. By displaying receipts and other documentation in a collage and paper maché in a geographical and geometrical form, the installation exemplifies my psychogeography experience within the public spaces and the microclimates that occurred with the happenings. The relationship I have derived from the water pools, and when I cast them, created the microclimate in which I truly engaged with the land and disrupted the city's power system. The design that uses the installation to exemplify this case where the happenings cast in bronze will disrupt the city grid. From the organic shape compared to the geometrical structure of the rest of the installation, the happenings in the land explore the anti-monument, rejecting the notion of the monument as an emblem of power and giving its importance to the land. The happenings have an ephemeral context on the paper maché installation, where my exploration of the paper maché's temporal aspect changed by the wear of people walking, contrasting with the bronze cast's longevity.As part of the installation, I am using a map. This map is a graphical representation of the installation as a tool to give the audience direction, orientation, and instructions on how to interact with the installation.
Adjacent to the installation are wearable sculptures. These three portable sculptures are the representation of my embodiment experience as a queer immigrant in Toronto and a queer outsider in Mexico City. With these wearable sculptures, I wanted to explore how navigating the city and interacting with the public impacts my embodiment experiences during my daily walks. These experiences prompted me to examine my identity in public and private spaces, the family dynamics of living in the diaspora and my concept of home (Ngo 93-126). The materiality and construction process of the wearable sculptures connect these themes to the "Happenings in the Land" installation. The difference is the provenance of the material selected for the wearable sculptures, in which the cardboard belongs to boxes that I had used for moving and receipts that I had archived from different places where I had a home, like Monrovia, California, Mexico City, Windsor, Ontario, Belleville, Ontario and Toronto. As Louise Bourgeois, I examine my body and perceptions shaped by others in these wearable sculptures (Pierrel). I chose to sculpt pieces like my body parts, snakes, zippers, handles, and luggage tags, to create symbols that convey themes of identity, home, and family dynamics. Also, using these symbols with the selected material and wearing them in public allowed me to examine objecthood, performativity and bodily acts