Edition of 5
Select "Request" to inquire or email info@accolagriefen.com
Alicia Smith is a Xicana artist and activist. She describes her work as “using her ancestors’ prayer technologies and the abject as tools to access the sublime towards the creation of new ceremonies for the present.” Smith’s work involves a re-forging of bonds with the past and the future through an ethics of kinship between the human and non-human.
Smith received her BFA from the University of Oklahoma and her MFA at the School of Visual Arts. Her work is included in private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She has exhibited at A.I.R. Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space and the University of Connecticut among other venues.
***
The Great Mother always appears at the precipice of some great trial or apocalypse. And there exists a long history of her apparitions being particularly potent to specific locations. Like the Virgen de Guadalupe on Tepeyac. In these spaces she not only appears to people during periods of transition and tumult, but she also speaks to them, heals them, performs miracles, makes promises, even resurrects the dead. During my period of grieving while living in Albuquerque (whose city water comes from the river) I found myself coming back to that place in the river again and again and speaking to her, leaving offerings to her, burying my own bodies in the shallow water and silt. I don't think its any accident that I found myself calling her Tonantzin, Our Mother in Nahuatl. She was infinitely merciful to me and that was the spirit I wanted to carry through in the words of the song. That you are never alone in your suffering. She is always watching, listening and ready to heal.
This project began by exploring alternative histories of land, in this case specifically the Rio Grande river, and creating a map that doesn't define borders but rather restores memories of a place. 500 people die a year crossing, many are descendants of those who thousands of years ago crossed heading South into Mexico. Recently a photograph went viral of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter Valeria's bodies on the banks of the river after they tragically drowned crossing. I wanted to create something that discussed that time and that grief. For the piece I wrote a poem and had it translated into Nahuatl, which is what you hear me singing in the video. It translates to:
"How much time Great River
Since you heard the good song of the Rememberer-People?
I will sing to you Great River
The good song, long like you, may it remind you
Of the good burial song Great River
You who watches like you are our mother
Watching our breath slow Great River
Dancing in your arms as you embrace us
our eyes you cover
The Rememberer-People Great River
The Cold-Not-Fish of your water
We crossed once before Great River
Now forever here we watch."
Essentially I'm asking the Rio Grande if it remembers me, if it remembers us. I have been thinking a lot about who bears witness to suffering. If knowing is witnessing and if that is a kind of mercy. The piece is also about trusting the word of the wound. It feels like people very casually share photos and videos of black and brown people dying and I find myself asking for another kind of mercy in that regard. That knowing what happened and seeing the pain it caused could be enough.
