Wounded Territory

Unglazed white stoneware
2023

A ceramic installation that speaks about territories divided and oppressed by borders. In her book Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldúa refers to the US/Mx border as an “open wound that is still bleeding”. While this installation takes reference from this analogy, it furthers the metaphor about land and borders beyond political territories. |
Territories here are understood as lands that were originally continuous, part of a whole, undulating topographies that share the same wildlife, peoples, languages, cosmologies. Entangled with the idea of the geographic territory is also the idea of the body, of the skin that composes the external materiality of it–the body as the smallest scale of territory that we inhabit. While the viewer might immediately associate this work to political borders when immersed in it, slowly, without noticing, the idea of territory becomes more about the individuality within their body, and less about the collective implicit in the geographic scale.

Photos: Mikey Mosher