part of our bodies, 2024.
Collage with watercolor, acrylic, marker, found paper, wire. Not available for purchase.
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Art by Clau Rocha
Poem by Maria Jose Ramos Villagra
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That wall has become part of our bodies.
Mea culpa, mea culpa,
mea máxima culpa.
That’s what my grandma used to say
because she knew that the pleasure on her veins
was larger than the pleasure accepted by the Church.
Sometimes I scare myself and the color of my skin
and I need to find excuses to pretend that everything is ok.
Yeah, babe, everything is fine.
It has become harder to identify the border
between my skin and your skin,
between you and me,
between what is private and what we do not accept.
The border between my mouth and something else.
Hoy descubrí
I can choose not to breathe.
I can choose to yell
en lugar de gemir.
Once I read that, we, people from Central America are small.
My grandma taught me that the smallest things are the noisiest.
Juntando mi cuerpo y el mio formamos una identidad concisa, a concise identity.
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María José Ramos Villagra is originally from Liberia, Costa Rica. Her paternal family survived the Salvadoran guerrilla war, which influenced her passion for human rights and activism. At age 16 she embarked on her travel adventures from country to country until she arrived in Albuquerque, New Mexico for her master’s degree in economics and sociology. During her master’s degree, she won several awards for her research on solidarity economies in Latin America and the American Southwest. She eventually decided that her happiness is found anywhere with her wife. She now works at a NGO helping small entrepreneurs establish their own businesses and offering financial education. In her free time, María José enjoys cooking, biking, and exploring. Her favorite pastime is to enjoy the extraordinary pleasure of mundanity with her wife and pets. It’s a blessing and a curse to walk through the world with our skin in different places and speak many languages.
Clau Rocha is an artist, writer, and divinatory practitioner with a hybrid research-studio practice that centers on reimagining archival spaces and Latinx narratives through storytelling and divination, often merging together aesthetics from academic library spaces and familial altars emphasizing the domesticana/x . They commonly use materials such as needles, dirt, red string, collage, and found-object ephemera as well as divination techniques such as throwing bones, bibliomancy, and cartomancy.
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1000 Words | Home Not Home Artists + Writers
Noa Alemán + Tamar Brooks • Jacqueline Almaguer + Alanis Castillo Caref • Lexi Alvarado + Isabela Ortega • Danielle Arend + Janina Gatilao • Sofia Brunwin + Spencer Hutchinson • Andrea Cole + Rocio Franco • Lydia Collins + Tarnynon Onumonu • Gregory Diaz + Irvin Ibarra • Danielle Dykerhouse + Betsy Van Die • Jonathan Espinoza + ben-aki • Jaymes Fedor + Maria Requena • Samantha Franco + Angeles Rangel • Ines Gardea + Angelica Davila • Frank Geiser + Penny Mann • Evelyn Hernandez + Valeria Osornio • Stephanie Hererra + Neha Chawla • Ivana Jarmon + Theo Sullivan • Vivian Jones + Luz Silva • Lewis Lain + Thulasi Seshan • Cesar Luna + benedicta m badia • Marie Magnetic + Jasmine Rodriguez • Delisha Mckinney + Paloma Velasco • Diana Noh + Juj-Lepe • Andrew Rehs + Corbett Berger • Clau Rocha + Maria Jose Ramos Villagra • Amyia Ross Brittanii Batts (Tanae b) • Fawaz Sakaw + Arianna Maggio • Lucero Sanchez + Clay-Cofre • Ramin Takloo-Bighash + Yiwen-Lyu • TEEL ONE + Melody Contreras • Pamela Trejo + Kim Yeoh • Cindy Uriostegui + Scum Drop • Ami Vasilopoulos + Stephanie Cruz Rincon • Ivy Waegel + Aryn Hills • Emily Schroeder Willis + Angelica Flores • Raine Yung + Micaela Petkus