Scheherazade or (Per)forming the Archive is a self-portrait - an autobiographical and performative meditation on being an artist, and on the intergenerational and transnational transmission of cultural history in the construction of identity.
Shortly before I left El Salvador at the onset of the civil war, I was asked to dance Scheherazade by the artist Julio Sequeira. At the time, I had no idea of Scheherazade’s bravery or incredible imagination. I could only focus on the sensual and erotic undertones that Rimsky Korsakov’s music conjured with its languid violin and tantalizing bells. I felt suffocated by the orientalist gaze. And I could not do the dance.
In 2006, a few years after my father’s passing, I was reminded of my teenage Scheherazade and decided to embody her on my own terms. Like the mythic Scheherazade, telling stories would ensure my survival, set me free. But the portrait felt unfinished. This year, three years after my mother’s death, I am (per)forming Scheherazade again -a new portrait- reflecting on the translations, the contradictions, and the passage of time.
Structured in four movements, much like Rimsky Korsakov’s symphonic suite, I weave through the archives of my Salvadoran/Palestinian Christian and Polish/French Jewish family. The intergenerational and intersubjective movements progressively affirm and reconceive the ‘other’ within me.
In the first movements, I subvert the orientalist, male gaze and resist familial legacies of trauma, silence and forgetting. Looking to the future, I join my son’s heartbeats in utero with my mother’s last breaths --and invite us to contemplate hybrid and apparently irreconcilable definitions of belonging and collective history.
Scheherazade or (Per)forming the Archive premiered as an installation at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C. and at the Cultural Center of Spain in San Salvador in 2016. The installation brought together Julio Sequeira’s painting Hombre Cósmico, the video Scheherazade and ARTE VOZ, a transnational sound booth that creates a site for the exchange of stories and heartbeats elicited by the art of Central America.
This Scheherazade is not a legend or a fairy tale, yet it affirms the power of cultural and personal narratives in the construction of identity. The fabric of our society— here and there, wherever there might be—is made of countless individual stories like mine, which in Walter Mignolo’s words, are “ingrained in the body and in local histories.” When spoken outloud and woven together, these stories show the complexity of history and identity and can become ours—heartbeats difficult to ignore—reverberating in the territory of our collective home.
