A Meditation on Memory, the Sacred, Feminism and Spiritual Activism
Directed by: Robin Garcia
The biggest challenge I have faced as a graduate student is learning how to integrate the work of spirit and my activist impulses into my academic life. It is clear that academic institutions have been built on the cartesian notion of separation between the mind and the body and the priveliging of the reason/mind matrix over the body and nature. This has meant an explicit silencing of the different expressions of knowledge that do not fit into linear and historicized articulations of being. The body, my body, the spirit, my spirit, has sufferend through the privleging of this reason/mind matrix. As a Phd student interested in exploring how to do academic activist without getting too burnt out or going too crazy because of the inherently racist and patriarchal nature of these institutions, I decided to create a short video with my women of color activist/spiritualist friends on how to challenge the silences and erasures of parts of ourselves, our histories, and our memories when we are within these institutions.
Reading Pedagogies of the Sacred by M. Jaqui Alexander provided a great window into the role the memory, the body, and the sacred can play in academic work interested in decolonization and re-writing history from the lens of those traditionally pushed to the periphery of social institutions and political participation. The text explores how memory becomes the central site of decolonization with embodied spiritual practice the most important site to recover the dormant stories of those silenced through the violence of colonialism and imperialism. This notion is eloquently summed up when Dr. Alexander says, "Healing work is the antidote to oppression."
The video expose above is a meditation on this notion. Most of the production process was created collectively. I invited several of my friends to discuss the challenges and successes they experienced as working class women of the color in the academy and to share strategies they used to negotiate their spiritual lives and bodies with static/stale material and classrooms. We collectively decided to share movements that helped us get through the day or reconnect us with our larger purpose of creating political interventions in the production of academic knowledge. Once we shared our movements we put them together into the choreography in the video.
The work itself became a beautiful reminder of the power of community and collectivity in this process of remembering and putting ourselves, our pasts, and our futures back together though embodied practice. Watching myself and my friends over and over in the editing process opened my eyes to the abundance of the multiple dimensions and layers we walk in and through each moment of everyday. The beauty and depth of that experience is difficult to articulate in the written word.
Please feel free to leave comments, hopes, dreams, and meditations on this subject because more than ever it is clear to me that healing work is really the antidote to oppression. To me that means healing by changing the systems of power which benefit from our silences and the erasures of memory, by integrating the body, learning how to hear and heal the stories of our ancestors, the ones buried deep in the earth whose souls still wrestle with death imposed from the violence of capitalist contact and colonial rule, and re-writing movement history collectively in order to write our future into existence.
The video expose above is a meditation on this notion. Most of the production process was created collectively. I invited several of my friends to discuss the challenges and successes they experienced as working class women of the color in the academy and to share strategies they used to negotiate their spiritual lives and bodies with static/stale material and classrooms. We collectively decided to share movements that helped us get through the day or reconnect us with our larger purpose of creating political interventions in the production of academic knowledge. Once we shared our movements we put them together into the choreography in the video.
The work itself became a beautiful reminder of the power of community and collectivity in this process of remembering and putting ourselves, our pasts, and our futures back together though embodied practice. Watching myself and my friends over and over in the editing process opened my eyes to the abundance of the multiple dimensions and layers we walk in and through each moment of everyday. The beauty and depth of that experience is difficult to articulate in the written word.
Please feel free to leave comments, hopes, dreams, and meditations on this subject because more than ever it is clear to me that healing work is really the antidote to oppression. To me that means healing by changing the systems of power which benefit from our silences and the erasures of memory, by integrating the body, learning how to hear and heal the stories of our ancestors, the ones buried deep in the earth whose souls still wrestle with death imposed from the violence of capitalist contact and colonial rule, and re-writing movement history collectively in order to write our future into existence.
Hi Robin,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the overall theme of spirituality and the way that the women come together and "draw a circle" of spirituality. I would recommend that you slow down some of the captions as I was unable to read them. I might be getting old, but also the volume was very low and it was hard to hear, though this may be a good strategy to draw the viewer closer by forcing us to watch it again.
Good job.
It seems to me, particularly after reading your essay, that the real power of this piece was in its making: the collaborative learning you did, the experiencing of the dance itself, the editing which gave you new opportunities to see. Academic work is mostly not centered upon such processes as much as it is on the rigorous endpoint where such experiences are formalized and made rigorous, hiding what brought them into being. With this in mind, I would suggest that putting more of your process into the video itself, would open up some of that experience (and strucure) to your audience, for whom it is not viewable without the essay. That said, perhaps this piece is foremost a private and personal testament to healing and collaboration, which is legitimate, although, not usually for academia. I like the way you blend the theoretical inspiration for your piece on to the work itself, and imagine that another layer of shooting the dance (from very close up) would add to the picture of intimacy and communion you hope to draw.
ReplyDeleteRobin, I appreciate how your video asks us to engage with a feminist, collaborative spirituality. The dance of three women was lovely, particularly the tangling and untangling! It is a very metaphoric and visceral image that speaks to your project. The text that interacts with the images is very intriguing for me. I wish I could read them longer, unless part of the project was to intentionally make them illegible. Again, I am really curious about the intentionality here. Great work.
ReplyDeleteDear Robin,
ReplyDeleteI agree with Shayda about the piece speaking well with the three women in a circle sharing their bodies language to communicate through the untangling process. I also agree with Lenore that the captions were not always clear but if the point was to keep them vague then it worked fine. I would have also liked to see you connected personally with the Jaqui Alexander theory in a more explicit form. Overall, job well done!
This essay has much to recommend it: thoughtful analysis, powerful media. I really hope you'll continue to work with this material because I believe you have important insights to share but have yet to fully work through how the form of relay (the internet, the blog rather than the essay) could be best suited to share this form (making it available to a range of readers), and organizing the material for maximum clarity not to mention self-awareness. Simply breaking the essay up into a series of shorter blogs with a title and video would be an easy and great first start. More compelling and complicated, however, would be to think how the theory of self-expression and the associated politics expressed in the work you study could be better replicated in your own sharing of these ideas: currently organized through a rather traditional format of the narrating, individual, expert, author. Your other classmates' work on this assignment would be a great place to look first for creative answers to these hard questions of form, format, voice, style, authority, and medium.
ReplyDelete