Review:
ESPEJIMOS/MIRAGE
As seen by:
Diamond Yao
Upon entering the room, visitors are immediately enveloped by calming sounds of water, chimes, bowls, cracks and drones. They face a black wall of changing, multilingual text. Further back, there are full wall projections of colours that are constantly shifting, with faint hints of poetry in multiple languages popping up here and there. Je suis la lumière [I am the light]. Che ha’e che ypykuera [I am my ancestors]. Abril temprano en la mañana [April early in the morning]. 我不会说中文 [I don’t speak Chinese].
It’s a dark, immersive introduction to the Espejismos / mirage multimedia installation about memory and legacy by the Torrents collective. Consisting of three artists who create in different mediums—visual artist Laura Criollo-Carrillo, poet Fiorella Boucher and musician An Laurence 安媛—their work aims to question heritage and explore how our memory anchors us in the past, present, and future. Espejismos / mirage is their first work together. Their respective cultural identities—-Criollo-Carrillo is Colombian-Canadian, Boucher is French-Guaraní and An Laurence is a Chinese transracial adoptee—-deeply inform their artistic practice. The multimedia installation was created during a four week residence at Ada X, a feminist artist-run center in Montreal.
All three artists were deeply inspired by their recent travels where they visited family abroad and places of personal significance. An Laurence went to China last year for the first time since her adoption, to see the land of her ancestors. “For me, it was a way to process a lot of my life”, she says. “There were a lot of things I couldn’t put into words, that I couldn’t explain to people, that I couldn’t even explain to myself. So I was able to process a lot of it [by returning to China].” Boucher went back to Argentina and Paraguay to visit relatives she hadn’t seen since the pandemic. She recorded interactions with her relatives that would form a part of the soundtrack of the installation.
“We hear my uncles in Guaraní teaching me so much. They know everything about plants, how to use them, their benefits – things that are beyond me”, she says. “There are things that belong to us but that we may not even know yet. We may be learning about them or maybe never learn about them.”
Boucher also recorded her mother giving her life advice in Spanish at two a.m. Criollo-Carrillo went to visit her brother in Australia for a month in the middle of the residency. She mightily struggled when she came back to Montreal. “My brain was still there with my brother, but my body was here. I was in a state where I could really see the effects of migration, of always being in different spaces”, she remembers.
As I settled on one of the thin mattresses on the floor surrounded by the shifting colours of the walls around me, I felt like I was about to begin watching a film at the movie theater. The ambient sounds and floating colours created a meditative atmosphere perfect for contemplating existence and asking myself questions about where I come from and where I’m going. I could make out vague images of subjects from everyday life—trees, water, flowers, indistinct faces, a street bustling with people, forests, balconies from an apartment building, insects, a piece of government ID. The pictures are from the artists’ personal archives. Criollo-Carrillo collected all the images and created some AI ones, digitally manipulated them by adding a blur effect on some sections and transformed them into a video. She further created image distortion by putting coloured filters over the projectors in the room. The entire projection creates an effect of mirage, mirroring the process of memory fragmentation that accompanies displacement.
Sometimes, lines of text would pop up out among the images. Je suis impossible [I am impossible]. La casa de mis padres y su silencio [my parents’ house and its silence]. avyaiteri aĩ haguëre koàpe [I’m happy I’m here]. They seemed like prompts to jolt reflections about our own heritages, personal histories and future dreams. Boucher wrote verses based on commonalities that she could find between all the collective members’ respective experiences with displacement and memory. At a poetry reading later, in French, Spanish, Guaraní and Mandarin Chinese, the three artists’ voices flowed in and out of each other, seamlessly traversing memories and geographical boundaries. A scene of being on a balcony in Colombia, thirsty and not being able to find water; a memorable experience of eating spicy fish soup in Chenzhou; wondering where, between the four cardinal directions, they would be able to place the absences, distances and beginnings migration and displacement created.
As the sounds continued to drone in waves around the room, I settled into a strange but calm trance. An Laurence created a soundtrack from the collective members’ recordings of everyday life–there are tracks of the artists’ loved ones talking, the background quotidian noises of an empty hotel room, the trickle of water. But everything has been so thoroughly digitally manipulated that the originals are unrecognizable. In fact, mixed together, they become a strange noise that I can’t quite place, but is constant. The longer I stayed on the floor, the more foreboding the drone that made the soundtrack’s bassline became. It almost felt like being asked to dig into the painful, fragmented memories that make a person who they are but are not easily accessible or even desirable. The calm I felt when I first sat down morphed into anxiety and uneasiness. Maybe there are some things that, over many displacements and migrations, we can’t remember—or that we don’t want to remember. And this internal state of dislocation will never leave us, no matter how hard we try.
In spite of their vastly different cultural backgrounds and displacement histories, the trio of artists managed to create an installation that can speak to universal experiences of dislocation and memory fragmentation found in diasporas worldwide. By allowing us to be immersed in those uneasy emotions, they shed light on internal experiences many displaced people keep hidden out of shame, fear or discomfort. Their artwork is a living embodiment of the often uncomfortable collective emotional memory of disparate diasporas around the world. Collective memory can serve to break the isolation that often accompanies migration, allowing displaced people to find community and wholeness in their splintered parts.