I am interested in the epistemological development of memory as an interlocutor of society and contested space. First and foremost I am interested in space--its material, aesthetic, and social iterations--as a dialogic form and object; how space, as such, is a staging ground and vehicle through which the turbulent formation of private and public identities across global, national, and local borderlands are consecrated and decimated; imagined and re-inscribed. Borders are both site and concept that demarcate the limits of control within nation-states (at their most politically and hegemonically employed). The thresholds of the borders are the liminalities that enable bodies, imaginations, memories, guns, contraband, politics and ideas to violently migrate between the porous limits of nations and identities.
My approach to space is architectural, anthropological, and aesthetic. This triad of approaches enables me to interrogate space in its material, cultural, and creative forms; and like a musical triad, I find each contingent upon the other to complete the sonorous potential of the spatial chord. Situated within the borderlands, this project assumes that the geographical and ideological limits are the appropriate grounds to investigate how marginal groups inhabit spaces between hegemonic narratives-like nation, gender, and ethnicity-to disrupt and re-appropriate power within their alterity.
To know the worlds of the borderlands, I believe cultural memory and its relationship to built and un-built space is a powerfully intimate yet pervasive locale of individual and collective identity formation. Contested spaces illuminate contested memory, orienting us towards the violence of breaking through identities inscribed upon the bodies circulated between conflicting spaces.
I see this as a transnational and transdisciplinary project. The sites of greatest interest to me at the moments are: the Berlin Wall and, in particular, the decade after its fall and the production of oestalgie; the US-Mexico borderlands and the necessarily subversive and re-imagined practices of citizenship produced by perpetual migration; and the East Jerusalem as a comparative site the re-presents the borderlands within a distinct matrix of cultural, political, and religious contestations. The nature and scope of this study demands several methodological approaches that can question and integrate the highly personal confrontation of physical borders within a greater critical and cultural narratives about conscripted subjects the work they do at the interstices of nations and socio-ethnic cultures.
Thus, comparative ethnographic and cultural study is needed for gleaning resonance of everyday lived practices within border spaces, as is critical theoretical comparativism, emanating from the humanities (literary and artistic works that fall under a general category of aesthetics) to confront how the work of the imagination is a key interlocutor and enabler of transformation within the bounded spaces of nations, bodies, and memory. In dialogue, such work provokes a reading of the borderlands, and its inhabitants, as a space of convergence of personal and collective limits in imaginative work and everyday practice, staged tenuously between the monoliths of belonging imposed hierarchically from the state down. At stake in these spaces, I believe, is the epistemological formation memory, one of the greatest social projects that formulates an individual or group’s possibility of knowing the worlds the inhabit.
