I have been thinking about how this Substack has evolved, and how it can be useful to me, and maybe to you. One thing I have not done a good job of is posting regularly. I think this has to do with me wanting to have something “important” to say, rather than just keeping up a writing practice here. Sometimes I feel like this has to be special, not academic, more personal, more intimate. And sometimes, I don’t know if I have the bandwidth.
However, I have come up with a little experiment. I have been a fan of the word-limit, or word-goal. That is how I wrote my most recent book on Scrivener, using word goals for sections. I also am a fan of the 500s (500 words on a topic or idea). So, I’m going to try a 500-word post on two things I saw at the Whitney Biennial. Actually, it is one thing from there, and one from across the city.
As I ride into the city on the Q train during the day, I can see Nicholas Galanin’s sculpture In Every Language There is Land/En cada lengua hay tuna tierra. A work of iron, a work of repetition, a work of remembrance. It uses the same iron as is used in the wall being erected between the US and Mexico. It takes the same shape of Robert Indiana’s Love sculpture, now at Rockefeller center. It spells out land. L-A-N-D. A landing sculpture that reminds of our relationships with place, divided by walls, divided by borders, divided by colonial laws and histories.
I went to the opening of the installation and remember being astounded not just by the size of the sculpture and its placement down at Brooklyn Bridge park—that is, just on the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge—but by how people were walking through it, on it. Months later, I would return and see children playing on the iron, as if a swing, as if a playground. And think this has to be right. This is right.
Recently, I went there with my friend Alejandra Zambrano, and her son Joaquín, both of whom had a layover in New York. We only had a morning, and Joaquín wanted to see the bridge, so I took them to this park, to this sculpture, and we stood there and took pictures on a day that wanted to be bright. An almost spring day.
And then last week my husband, James, and I went to the opening of the Whitney Biennial. Our friend Seba Calfuqueo had invited us. She has a work there called TRAY TRAY KO, a film in which she draws a line with a glimmering blue fabric across a stream in the Mapuche homelands.
But we were there and I also saw Demian DinéYazhi’, another dear friend, whose work we must stop imaging apocalypse/genocide + we must imagine liberation (2024) would cause a bit of a stir. At the time I didn't know that it was going to be controversial. But Demian had told me that a journalist reached out to them asking for a comment, and I wanted to figure out what the deal was.
It is a work in red neon blasting poetry and resistance across three panels. And a flicker. At first I didn’t quite see it, but as I walked by I noticed one letter buzz out of focus, and then on another panel, another letter. And as I worked my way to the third panel, I realized what it said: Free Palestine.
The controversy. Of course. But opposing genocide shouldn’t be controversial. It shouldn’t be, but somehow it is?
The work faces away from the room, faces the window, toward the East River toward New Jersey. And I realized that Galanin’s work, in contrast, faces Brooklyn. Two works that buffet Manhattan/Mannahatta, each facing those who approach the island. Each facing those who enter, as sentinels, as prayers. As reminders to those who come here, that this land is Indigenous, that all languages have a name for that land, that Palestine is one such place, that it is currently under siege, like our ancestors were under siege, like the land itself has been under siege for 500 years. And I think: this cannot be coincidence. That is a phrase I learned from Seba. She told me once: We are indios, we don’t believe in chance.