Innombrable

From the artist: This work aims to blend digital collage making, 3d blob drawing, virtual reality painting, and video to simultaneously express and document memories and my desires. Through this process of collage, I nurture my queer identity as an Andinx person. I have been learning Quechua for over a year, with the goal to be fluent like my father and grandparents. Learning the language requires me to learn about the history of indigenous resistance throughout the Andes (Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru), and the political, cosmological, and philosophical systems that existed before the Spanish, and that are continuing to change and resist today. It also requires me to shift my thinking, to be especially critical of the Judeo-Christian imposition of cis-hetero dominance onto the people (and the language), and the subsequent rejection of any indigenous sexualities or gender identities that were deemed unnameable (La Imposición de la Heterosexualidad en el Mundo Andino, Edgar Soliz Guzmán). The video begins with the word hucha, its shape beginning to transform through distortion, colour, inserted images, text, and sound. This is an effort to detangle Judeo-Christian imposed meaning and shame from the WORD. Hucha (the earliest recovered definition): failure to follow something through, heavy feeling created by humans. Hucha (Post-evangelization and colonization): sin/pecado, fault/culpa, offence, crime. (Source: Quechua Spanish English Dictionary by Odi Gonazales, Christine Mladie Janney, Emily Fjaellen Thompson, QichwaDic App) As a questioning-genderqueer person of indigenous descent, and navigating a Christian dominant society, I am a living, breathing failure of cis-heteronormativity. With this work, I want to play into my cis-heteronormative “failures” and indigenous queer “wins”.

October 21, 2021 at 7:00 PM

About the artist

Margarita Soria (they/them) is a Tkarón:to/Toronto based dance artist, who is finally learning how to skateboard. They have Andinx and Irish/Slovakian settler roots. They are learning to speak Quechua Chanka, South Bolivian Quechua, as well as the Norte Potosí variety, which their family speaks. Their work explores themes of escaping-time and dance as a “memory projector”. As a visual artist, they use impulse and distortion to build a playground where ancestral memory and desire can meet. They have completed residencies in Whitehorse, YT (the Heart of Riverdale) and in Oaxaca, Mexico (Pocoapoco).

Images: family photos/personal photos and stock images from the web

Banner image description (“ayllu”): A colorful collage of 3D squiggles and shapes interacting with images that have been cropped or overlayed onto 3d shapes. From left to right, images include, a flying condor, a coca leaf, a brownish red, Andean textile with images of creatures, a photo of Margarita’s father, Marcelo and great-grandmother, Pelagia, an uncooked cheese filled empanada, oka in yellow, green, and red, Margarita’s back with a temporary butterfly tattoo, another flying condor with its right wing wrapped by a squiggle, a pile of chuño, another Andean textile, green habas, a partially hidden locoto pepper, the same image of Margarita’s father and great-grandmother, and a portion of Margarita’s face.