Sound piece, speakers, cloth cubby/cave dimensions variable.
M_Othering text by curator Abbra Kotlarczyk
Lucreccia Quintanilla’s reconfiguration of a sound work produced as part of the 2018 exhibition Family Grimoires: The Diaspora Fantastic (curated by Diego Ramirez for Seventh Gallery) becomes itself an echo, situated within a practice concerned with sound as a mode of knowledge transference through various impulses of diasporic space-time temporality. For this iteration entitled Our voices together, bouncing off the walls (2019), Quintanilla has hand-stitched and precariously draped a synthetic and temporary cave-like cubby structure as a kind of fraught but effectual echo-chamber. As itself a reiteration, this work—which sounds out attempts at translating Indigenous words from her native El Salvador, back and forth between herself and her teenage son—signals one more step of removal within a five hundred year process of cultural dispossession. Where Wayne Kostenbaum declares “the internet is everyone’s mother” [ref] this is perhaps no more true than confronting the futile task of attempting to authentically reconnect with displaced Indigenous lineages via the reductive and superficial tendencies of You Tube.