My work strives to excavate genealogies of uncommitted identities, trajectories of ambivalent gazes, and ghosts that visually whisper recognitions. I am particularly interested in how dominant power relations alienate, invisibilize, and pathologize differences, and where people then send their eyes to resist assimilative forces. My work seeks to question how eyes connect with specters from shared pasts, stories, and legacies. It seeks to chart the discontinuities that dominance invisibilizes, foregrounding negative space not as dialectical, but as kaleidoscopic ghosts of atemporal landscapcs.
“Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present.” - Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994
“Decision, the moment of saying yes, is prompted by something deeper; recognition. . . . These chance sightings, these portents, these returns, begin the unconscious connection with the subject, an unconscious connection that waits for an ordinary moment of daylight to show its face.” - Jeanette Winterson, Weight, 2005
“Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return and who or which will not be asked to commit toe the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, State, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity), just opening which renounces any right to property, and right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event as the foreigner itself, to her or him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope—and this is very place of spectrality.” – Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, 1994.
"The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized as is never seen again." - Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 1968
