[-empyre-] The Remittance House

[Alva Mooses]

Ana, your comments on language are also a way to map migration, through the
intersection of multiple tongues.

Even the relationships in Nordic languages show traces of a very nomadic
people. A couple years ago I was photographing historic grass-roofed house
structures to emphasize that similar styles of building were carried from
Norway to the Faroe Islands and Iceland. Although Danes and Northern
Europeans all come from migrant histories and have migrant blood in their
veins, it seems the notion of a migrant is rarely applied to people of that
region today.

all best,

Alva

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 3:24 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Ana,
>
> I have an essay "Questions of Accent" that caused a lot of controversy
> when it first came out in the 1990's and that is directly relevant to what
> you are saying here. It can be accessed on line, in its entirety in the
> following site:
> http://ziyalan.com/marmara/murat_nemet_nejat3.html
>
> Ciao,
> Murat
>
> On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 11:53 PM, Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>> Dear all I am older than Paula :) and maybe that's the reason I am not
>> shy using English as linguafranca here. As Coco Fusco pointed out once "we
>> are talking broken English here" :)
>> and the   phletore of different accents make English more interesting :)
>> It's also a way of speak about refugees and immigrants how they change
>> the languages making possible new dialects and nuances and shades.
>> There is not "the Queen's English" but a complex weave where
>> Shakespeare's English merge with Danish from the time Britain was ruled by
>> Danish chieftains and with the Normand ' s French which was also tainted by
>> their native Norse.
>> In a post colonial reading of languages it's easy to see how writers from
>> the "periphery" change the soul of a language and make it more vital and
>> eloquent. Salman Rushdie Derek Walcott Arundathi Roy V S Naipal Toni
>> Morrison Nadine Gordimer for English Tahari Ben Jelloun Gisele Halimi and
>> so many others for French Garcia Marquez Vargas Llosa and many more for
>> Spanish all born in the "colonies", writing and speaking a colonized
>> language, the "master's language" but melted and merged with indigenous and
>> hybrid words, la négritude, as Aimé Cesaire coined as expression, plenty
>> more.
>> The refugees and immigrants are a part of the permanent movement of
>> change and trying to stop it is useless the changes are as regular as the
>> tide rising.
>> Ana
>> Den 18 feb 2016 04:34 skrev "Ricardo Dominguez" <rrdominguez at ucsd.edu>:
>>
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>> Hola Alva,
>>>
>>> Thanks for sharing the work that you have been doing and developing
>>> collectively.
>>>
>>> The text that you shared reminds me of Alex Rivera's documentary the
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *Sixth Section: http://alexrivera.com/project/sixth-section/
>>> <http://alexrivera.com/project/sixth-section/> *This perhaps this
>>> enfolds the question of transversal economies, remittance cultures, and the
>>> field of dreams and immigration (specific to Mexico/U.S. conditions) - but
>>> perhaps at play on global scale as well, I would imagine.
>>>
>>> The undocumented create not only a construct a baseball stadium, buy a
>>> baseball team, get instruments of the band -a dream society back home that
>>> most of them will never be able to touch or smell-but non-the-less create a
>>> form of agency at a distance (a networked existence or expression) that
>>> forces governance at state level to finally responded and meet face to face
>>> with undocumented. The undocumented use the "imaginary" sixth section of
>>> their to force the state government to meet with them and start to build
>>> roads and infrastructure.
>>>
>>> Very best,
>>> Ricardo
>>>
>>> On 2/16/16 11:52 AM, Alva Mooses wrote:
>>>
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> In responding to the topic of networks and migration in the Mexico/U.S.
>>> context, I think of Sarah Lynn Lopez’s research, The Remittance House:
>>> Architecture of Migration in Rural Mexico. Lopez writes:
>>>
>>> Remittance houses are emblematic of a profound shift in rural Mexican
>>> society. Perhaps the single most striking quality of the remittance
>>> construction is the social distance embedded in its form. Scholars of the
>>> built environment can contribute to the study of how migration is
>>> transforming rural Mexican society by analyzing changes in spatial format
>>> both migrants’ places of origin and points of arrival. Social relations
>>> stretched across geographies and exacerbated by distance increasingly
>>> define places. Places in Mexico are marked by the absences and familial
>>> fragmentation that constitute ‘migration as a way of life’. These absences
>>> are a necessary precondition for migrants to realize their dream houses.
>>>
>>>
>>> Over the past year I have been working with four NY-based artists that
>>> are originally from Mexico, Cuba, Chile and Brazil to form the
>>> collective Grupo < > <http://cargocollective.com/grupomasquemenosque>.
>>> We have been meeting a couple times a month and corresponding with one
>>> another via email to create a collective text that connects personal
>>> narratives of origin to our work. Throughout the text we are able to
>>> discuss our distinct experiences as a refugee, immigrant, the experience of
>>> temporary work abroad and diaspora. We repeatedly describe the architecture
>>> of th e spaces that we have lived in, the geography and language; at times
>>> multiple voices become one.
>>>
>>> This is a clip from one of our first shared readings of the text:
>>> https://:.com/155157046 <https://vimeo.com/155157046>
>>> We are currently discussing ways for our Grupo < > project to extend
>>> beyond the five of us.
>>> Kind regards,
>>>
>>> Alva
>>>
>>>
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