As part of the Center Program work I developed this past year at Hyde Park Art Center, I focused on creating an immersive piece including collage, installation, sound and performative gestures ritualizing nostalgia and honoring matriarchal lineage.
The song tells the story of three, yearning--dying to return to their lover's arms. Each track sinks into its own melancholy. Two of the sounds are only a fraction of time apart from meeting at the same lyrical extraction of the song, only to end in different places.

What is a home built between stolen land and a bus ride north?
What is home but the flesh
carried on your bones—
a knee so keen on continuing without you.
An achilles sprung on promise,
a hand bent on building a shelter?
Coming home has always been the
timbre of my mother’s laughter,
the task of remembering two cities with one stone.
The smell of dirt sun and city moon.
Coming home is combing two languages between my fingers.

Volver | Return is a visual ballad dedicated to memory, and nostalgia—an attempt to turn man-made boundaries into ambiguous spaces. Volver | Return references the bridges between family history and necessary surthrival that happens despite removal from the place of “origin.”


Volver Installation at Dojo in Pilsen
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