Qué poca vergüenza (No ay pedo ay peda wei)
Review of Estelle Maisonett’s Todos Somos Iguales, 2017
I read somewhere once that shame is a conditioned emotion. Psychology Today calls it a contagious feeling that arises “when we anticipate being viewed as lacking or inadequate in our intellect or abilities,” “a clear signal that our positive feelings have been interrupted.” Driven by the threat of social exclusion and the human instinct to survive, we seem to avoid feeling shame out of fear of admitting that we are what the world around us has deemed punishable.
My mother was regularly chastised for speaking Spanish when she and her family first immigrated from Colombia to Connecticut in the 1970s. One time at her Catholic elementary school, she didn’t know how to say that she needed to use the restroom in English. She begged the only bilingual student in her class to help her translate, but the girl only teased her and turned back around. The teacher nun yelled at my mom to get up and put her nose on the chalkboard as punishment for talking. She was hit repeatedly with a meter stick in front of the class before being sent to walk home alone, the urine still running down her leg.
It makes sense why she hadn’t told me this story until a few years ago, why she never prioritized teaching me Spanish as a child, and why when she speaks English there is lingering pause. By the time she shared this story, I had already found shame in and all around me growing up in the borderlands of South Texas. Despite the majority of my classmates being raised between Mexico and the US, our public school system also discouraged Spanish speaking at school. Except, in the Rio Grande Valley we don’t speak Spanish, we speak Spanglish -- pocho. My childhood friend, whose family also came from South America, couldn’t stand the bastardization of Spanish and English (almost as much as she couldn’t stand to remember that she was born and raised in the US). A language purist, she criticized and overcorrected my mixing up of words and conjugations. I quickly grew to resent my parents for not teaching me Spanish properly, a contribution to my own inability, my inadequacy, to “authentically” claim roots.
My mother was regularly chastised for speaking Spanish when she and her family first immigrated from Colombia to Connecticut in the 1970s. One time at her Catholic elementary school, she didn’t know how to say that she needed to use the restroom in English. She begged the only bilingual student in her class to help her translate, but the girl only teased her and turned back around. The teacher nun yelled at my mom to get up and put her nose on the chalkboard as punishment for talking. She was hit repeatedly with a meter stick in front of the class before being sent to walk home alone, the urine still running down her leg.
It makes sense why she hadn’t told me this story until a few years ago, why she never prioritized teaching me Spanish as a child, and why when she speaks English there is lingering pause. By the time she shared this story, I had already found shame in and all around me growing up in the borderlands of South Texas. Despite the majority of my classmates being raised between Mexico and the US, our public school system also discouraged Spanish speaking at school. Except, in the Rio Grande Valley we don’t speak Spanish, we speak Spanglish -- pocho. My childhood friend, whose family also came from South America, couldn’t stand the bastardization of Spanish and English (almost as much as she couldn’t stand to remember that she was born and raised in the US). A language purist, she criticized and overcorrected my mixing up of words and conjugations. I quickly grew to resent my parents for not teaching me Spanish properly, a contribution to my own inability, my inadequacy, to “authentically” claim roots.
Estelle Maisonett is among one of several people I’ve bonded with in my adult life over the internalized shame that permeates Latinx communities for not being “Hispanic enough” (or worse, too American). “When I’m with my Latina friends they make fun of me and call me ‘white girl’ because I’m lighter skinned and can’t keep up with Spanish conversations sometimes,” she tells me over the phone. “But when I’m the only Latinx person in a group show, suddenly I’m an authority on Día de los Muertes and all things Mexican.” The multidisciplinary artist is based in the Bronx and was born to Mexican and Puerto Rican parents who were raised in Harlem. Having always lived in New York, Maisonett’s multicultural identity is informed not by having come from someplace else, but by the relationships, environments, and objects that continuously shape her selfhood. This is the inspiration for her artistic practice, which relies on the use of found objects, photography, and sourced clothing to construct life-size collages that contemplate the external forces that tell us who we are.
Todos Somos Iguales (2017) is a mixed-media work that tells of Maisonett’s struggle with negotiating Americanness. Created on a deteriorated US flag that she found rotting in a utility closet at a public school, the work reads in Spanish: “We Are Americans, We Are Mexicans, and Together, We Are Human.” The words are a meditation on the common requirement in US public schools to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, despite the irony that “liberty and justice for all” does not reflect the reality of innumerous immigrants. Addressing the word “indivisible,” Maisonett’s declaration defies grammar rules by pairing the plural verb Somos (We Are) with the singular noun Human (You Are), and suggests the playful reimagining of language as a tool for embracing one’s hybridized identity. However, the work also alludes to Maisonett’s own struggle with defining her multicultural upbringing, sharing that, “The American Flag has always made me uncomfortable. It doesn't feel like a symbol that represents me or one I identify with, even though I have grown up and lived in the US my entire life.”
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Todos Somos Iguales (2017) is a mixed-media work that tells of Maisonett’s struggle with negotiating Americanness. Created on a deteriorated US flag that she found rotting in a utility closet at a public school, the work reads in Spanish: “We Are Americans, We Are Mexicans, and Together, We Are Human.” The words are a meditation on the common requirement in US public schools to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, despite the irony that “liberty and justice for all” does not reflect the reality of innumerous immigrants. Addressing the word “indivisible,” Maisonett’s declaration defies grammar rules by pairing the plural verb Somos (We Are) with the singular noun Human (You Are), and suggests the playful reimagining of language as a tool for embracing one’s hybridized identity. However, the work also alludes to Maisonett’s own struggle with defining her multicultural upbringing, sharing that, “The American Flag has always made me uncomfortable. It doesn't feel like a symbol that represents me or one I identify with, even though I have grown up and lived in the US my entire life.”
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Home in a Box
Meditations on Lingfei Ren’s 2D, 4D, 6D, 7D (2020).
For the last week I’ve co-presented an at-home exhibition from the inside of a Brooklyn apartment that has been uneasy to call “home” since I began subletting seven months ago. After signing off of the fourth and final talk, I packed the artworks up along with the rest of my stuff.
Fittingly featured in the exhibition is artist Lingfei Ren’s sculptural work titled 2D, 4D, 6D, 7D (2020), which contemplates the subjectivization of rented living space. Caught between the generic and the personal, the same unit from different floors within an apartment building is superimposed onto itself. Ren stacks the various tenants’ furniture and belongings between numerous sheets of acrylic, creating an image that appears as if the only person who occupies the room might be a hoarder. Stranger tenants collide their most personal bubbles to compose a final picture that is as crowded as the very notion of a prefab space.
I’m reminded of a picture I took after closing the door on my first apartment in Austin. The urge to capture it must have come more from disbelief than sentimentality, as I bore witness to the malleability of a space that so convincingly felt like mine and yet so readily reverted back to its intended function as an indistinguishable, duplicable object. For the first time since moving, I remembered the moment when I first entered the empty space and thought, “Wow, this looks weird,” which, ironically, likely happened just hours after the last tenant had gazed uneasily and closed the door behind them. Yes, Ren’s work operates as a literal composite of several existences within the same spatial bounds at once (above and below each other) but it is also a pictorial representation of the countless lives and ghosts of tenants past that rented homes apathetically collect and discard.
Fittingly featured in the exhibition is artist Lingfei Ren’s sculptural work titled 2D, 4D, 6D, 7D (2020), which contemplates the subjectivization of rented living space. Caught between the generic and the personal, the same unit from different floors within an apartment building is superimposed onto itself. Ren stacks the various tenants’ furniture and belongings between numerous sheets of acrylic, creating an image that appears as if the only person who occupies the room might be a hoarder. Stranger tenants collide their most personal bubbles to compose a final picture that is as crowded as the very notion of a prefab space.
I’m reminded of a picture I took after closing the door on my first apartment in Austin. The urge to capture it must have come more from disbelief than sentimentality, as I bore witness to the malleability of a space that so convincingly felt like mine and yet so readily reverted back to its intended function as an indistinguishable, duplicable object. For the first time since moving, I remembered the moment when I first entered the empty space and thought, “Wow, this looks weird,” which, ironically, likely happened just hours after the last tenant had gazed uneasily and closed the door behind them. Yes, Ren’s work operates as a literal composite of several existences within the same spatial bounds at once (above and below each other) but it is also a pictorial representation of the countless lives and ghosts of tenants past that rented homes apathetically collect and discard.
In this way, the prefab apartment to the impermanent occupant is not unlike the gallery space to the curator. We pour our labor, resources, and idiosyncratic care into the exhibitions we painstakingly plan and research. The moment then arrives to present our hard work and that of our invited artists, whose presences vis-a-vis their artworks help render the gallery into an intellectually and emotionally nurturing world. It transforms into our world for a time, for exactly however long time allows it to remain ours. But the deinstall--the moving, shipping + handling of things--requires the markings of this moment be scrubbed from the gallery’s walls, whose plastered surfaces must be matched and patched as seamlessly as a human hand can make them. With that, these walls are passed on to construct another’s dream.
The transient nature of the gallery and the cookie-cutter apartment blur together in the case of the at-home exhibition-in-a-box. Two years to the date, I’m again moving out during finals week. This time there’s no moving company or heavy furniture to lug, just suitcases and a paranoid subletter to appease. Having slept in someone else’s bed for so many months, I’ve always known that this place was never mine to call home. Does that mean handing over the keys should feel any easier?
The transient nature of the gallery and the cookie-cutter apartment blur together in the case of the at-home exhibition-in-a-box. Two years to the date, I’m again moving out during finals week. This time there’s no moving company or heavy furniture to lug, just suitcases and a paranoid subletter to appease. Having slept in someone else’s bed for so many months, I’ve always known that this place was never mine to call home. Does that mean handing over the keys should feel any easier?