An Opening Gesture
This is a dissertation.
This is incomplete.
This is a story.
This is not my story.
This is a landing.
This is a collection of potentials.
This is an attempt.
This is a representation of an event, ongoing…
I perform gestures around a speculative topography, a critical terrain. Here it is, already incomplete. This speculative topography confronts and maps the traces and echoes of imperialism/colonialism in the spaces I have moved through, in hopes of charting a path of acknowledgement, healing, and reparation.
This is just one path, a tentative roadmap.
I find myself sitting on and with a body of critical creative work that has refused to leave me alone and asks to be addressed. I am still figuring out why and how. To address it directly would be to misunderstand it. It must be approached by oblique angles and off-axis vectors. Through the frame and within it. Beyond it.
These are my kin — we are in relation, are forming each other in relation. We have only just begun. It doesn’t begin here, but we begin here.
These pieces arrive in their particular forms and modes for a reason.
How do we approach them?
I suppose it is up to me, and I want us to wait for a moment.
We unveil heterotopic spaces, mirror spaces.
This is a space of record, this is a space of rest.
This is an ongoing topographical transformation.
I am trying to describe a process, a practice, a methodology, a relation, a site.
What are the romances we tell each other, tell ourselves?