queering the margins is a Spanish-English mixed media community installation that incorporates the voices, experiences and participation of Queer Asylees and Queer Asylum seekers. The margins that are queered are those of the U.S. nation-state where the quintessential citizen is a white, heterosexual, patriotic, able-bodied and politically enfranchised male. Placing publicly these marginal experiences, bodies, sexualities and sites of desire produces the queering of these margins. In this project I use the term Queer Asylum, mindful of the limitations of this terminology. I am aware that the term Queer is used primarily in U.S. contexts to refer to LGBTI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex) people and I use it as an umbrella term rather than as an identity that all participants claim for themselves. Additionally, even though Queer Asylum is not part of the language used by the Department of Homeland Security or the Unites States Citizenship and Immigration Services, I choose to use it to reference people who are granted asylum or refugee status in the United States due to past or fear of future persecution based on sexual desire or gender identity.
I will exhibit queering the margins through community organizations and in community art centers in San Francisco. This installation includes a series of interviews with five participants. I also incorporate myself as a participant by sharing my own experience with the asylum process. The interviews are presented as audio clips organized in a non-hierarchical database and provide the aural structure that will accompany the aesthetic and visual aspects of the installation.
This project works around three main foci that lead both the theoretical framework and the aesthetics of the installation. The first focus “melancholia from the margins” gravitates around the structures of feeling that surround migration and the institution of asylum in the U.S. as well as around participants’ emotions such as loss and dislocation. Its main emphasis is the audio clips and the affect present in each of the participant’s voices.
The second focus deals directly with the institution of asylum and I use the sentence “membership in a particular social group”, as its title, because this is the language that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) uses to refer to asylum based on sexual identity. “Membership in a particular social group” is a vague sentence used by the USCIS to claim flexibility around who enters the U.S. but it plays the role of controlling and dehumanizing queer migrant people rendering their sexuality invisible and illegitimate as a basis for asylum.
Lastly, “document as fetish” refers to the investment in the document/ary that my project embodies. This investment works around documents such as asylum cards, employment cards, passports, the status of undocumented, the act of producing a document or affidavit when applying for asylum which narrates a particular story of sexuality and violence, the bureaucracy produced during the process of applying for asylum such as fingerprints and F.B.I. checks and also, documenting or archiving the participant’s experiences.
The methodology used in this project consists of a series of interviews and audio journals recorded in a digital audio HD recorder as well as the production of videos as a way of promoting a collective self-representation through a workshop using the Palabras interface designed by Sharon Daniel. This interface is ideal for the development of this project because it allows for participants to easily edit clips together and for participants in different locations to see the process and progress on-line. The videos will be produced by the participants individually and in a series of workshops in collaboration with “El-La” an organization for and run by transgender Latina women in San Francisco.
The interviews already performed asked questions geared towards revealing some of the contradictions regarding the asylum process and its failures and how these contradictions are embodied and lived in our experiences. The second stage of the interviews is based on audio journals that we as participants, working in pairs, will mail back and forth with answers to one initial question. All the audio material recorded will be transcribed organized around the aforementioned foci.
In queering the margins communal structures of feelings such as those of dislocation, loss, melancholia, mourning and nostalgia are invoked through the visual elements and aural elements in the installation. In this project participants are asked to engage in a participatory art-work that emerges from a set of collective concerns, intimate dialogs and conversations that can collectively produce a counter-narrative to the insitutionalized one generated by the Department of Homeland Security, which is invested in particular narratives of citizenship, trauma and sexuality. This art-work aims to be aware of the dangers of therapeutic healing and confessional models such as the creation of a universal queer migrant experience that erases the specificities of each one’s experiences and locations.
The primary audience I want to engage with this project is composed of queer migrants, queer asylum-seekers, queer asylees, Spanish-speaking immigrant communities and other queer and non-queer diasporas. Secondly, I want different layers of my project to speak to a larger community of artists, scholars and people interested in installation art.
The space will have three main visual elements: The first visual element incorporates low resolution digital videos produced by each of the participants showing our daily lives, intimate spaces, spaces where we feel comfortable, places we call home, and also places we do not feel at ease. This visual element speaks to the “melancholia from the margins” focus. The second visual element is composed of documents such as asylum declarations, asylum application forms, asylum cards, passports, social security cards, fake documents, green cards, work permits, etc. This images will be manipulated to not show the participants names. This element is directly related with the “document as fetish” focus of the project. Lastly, the third element is composed of images that are less embodied, that will speak to the participants’ audio clips. They will be experimental and B/W.
The three visual elements will inhabit three body size thin screens that will have rear back projection. One of the screens will have a sensor and will only play video/audio when someone interacts with it. The other screens will be playing constantly.
English and Spanish translations will be in the wall, no subtitles added on the screen.
One projector, a space that allows for rear back projection, three body size screens (that I will build), that might be hanging from the ceiling, audio equipment with two speakers, one sensor that will be installed on one of the screens and that will activate the audio and the visuals on one screen through a Max/MSP patch.
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