“This personal map is charted from postcards i collected across our continent. “Frames” was made in tandem with the writing of “North By South”, a literary experiment after journeying across South and North America, chronicles from a continent that feels connected but disjointed at the same time. Both pieces speak to the experience of a queer hitchhiker and the collective consciousness I found on the way. It’s bilingual travel literature with confessions you’d find in a diary –after suffering a family crisis. It’s a way to look at this land, the borders established in it, and the nature of our migratory movements. These are maps of routes across the Southern and Northern hemispheres but also, a written exercise towards healing”.
Below is a conversation between hernán and writer, scholar, artist Matthew Lawrence
ML: Your piece includes a large map of the Americas, where South America is on the left and the United States is on the right. It seems like there’s a certain freedom to be gained – maybe just creatively but maybe more than that, too – from redrawing maps and national boundaries. Can you talk a little about maps as an art form and why you chose this format for this particular piece?
HJ: So the piece grew as I was writing of my experiences moving from one place to another. And I think that I needed to graphically represent, to somehow see those spaces collide in some way. I needed to see those spaces existing on the same plane, on the same surface, and add to that my own body—the limits of my own body—as a way to articulate how intertwined all of that is to me. I think maps, as a tool, definitely have colonialist implications: how we understand territory and how we make it accessible to ourselves. That being said, I think they hold a symbolic power that, to me as a creator, allows me to articulate thoughts and explore my own experience with them.
That aside, there is some kind of politics that becomes present when we position the north above the south, and I think history—at least recent history—confirms those power dynamics, those politics, which I want to challenge. That's present in me all of the time when I look at maps. My intention in this particular piece was not necessarily to challenge those politics, but rather to bring them closer to me as someone who is affected by them.
ML: You’re from Argentina, but this piece for me recalls the Chilean artist Juan Downey. Both Chile and Argentina had extremely grim dictatorships later in the twentieth century, both of which were supported by the United States. Downey’s work from the 1970s is rather optimistic, with swirls of color replacing national boundaries. Your work in a sense does the opposite, in one instance making clear the legal distinctions between countries in South America. You’ve traveled extensively, so could you talk a bit about the realities of national borders in places you’ve been, and specifically how you’ve seen that impact the people there?
HJ: What I can say about national boundaries is fairly limited to my own experience traveling. And it’s interesting that Juan Downey is being brought up because his piece in which different colors swirl around the landmass of South America actually coincides with an earlier piece that I have made in which, again, colors are merging into one another, disregarding any political boundaries. And I think that speaks to the understanding I have of those boundaries being merely political. And of course it’s no small thing.
But there is another type of how different regions exist and establish identity, which is more regional and sometimes a lot more blurry. Less clear, way more heterogeneous. The Northwest of Argentina has a lot more in common with the neighboring country of Bolivia than it does, perhaps, with other areas of Argentina. In fact, when I was about to cross the border from La Quiaca, which is Argentina, to the border town Villazón in Bolivia, I remember there is one path for people like me who are not from the area and are just passing through. And then there’s a separate path altogether, a bridge over a small river that is traveled by locals. And you can see how fluidly people use that bridge to go from one place to the other. So different boundaries are in place for different people. From what I saw it seemed like it was one order overriding another order, and that only made sense for people needing to attain their legality or stamp from the immigration office –not for people running daily errands. So borders become relevant according to who needs to go through them, I guess. I say this to enhance the idea that borders are fluid in my experience. There’s a legal order that also is there, but that’s not the only one, and I would say it works to the advantage of a lot of people that there are alternative ways of navigating those spaces.
ML: On your website you describe this project as “bilingual travel literature with confessions you’d find in a diary after suffering a family crisis”, and I found myself wondering whether the crisis was the family discovering the diary or whether it was the crisis that came first and inspired the diary writing. Is this a diary that’s secretly meant to be discovered? Or is it really a personal project where you aren’t thinking about who’s seeing it?
HJ: So the diary grows from the experiences I had after a family crisis, so it follows that episode of trauma as a way to cope with it, understand it better, and heal from it. It’s also interesting to think about who might read the diary. It’s definitely a personal project, but I am thinking about who might read it, although it’s funny that I am writing this in English and my mother tongue is Spanish, and I would say most of my family would not be able to read the diary completely in English. And that actually feels like it would be an important piece of the healing process, to have my family members encounter this writing and reading it.
But I think there’s another piece to it that articulates some of the politics I was describing earlier, that makes it necessary for me to make that translation into English and to speak directly to the people who live in this country, who use English as their main language. So I have positioned myself strategically in the tongue of what I think is the oppressor, so that I can communicate directly with it. It is something that I am still trying to understand fully and unravel. But I think the riddle has to do with who’s the actual oppressor and if it is located within my family, or if it’s rooted somewhere else. And by approaching this other language, I am somehow trying to convince myself that I’m addressing it. And maybe that’s what feels necessary for me to do in this moment.
ML: I spent a while in front of the window reading the piece, and thinking about the use of Spanish and English text at a literal intersection where some people are monolingual English speakers and some are monolingual Spanish speakers. Your piece feels extremely personal, but who were you picturing as your audience when you installed this window?
HJ: I touched a bit on this just now, but I have to be honest: I don’t think I have a very clear sense of who the audience is. And it’s something that happens to me a lot when I am creating because I’m often unsure! And it’s a bit of a moot point because a lot of people, for example on the [art] funding-side want to know, they ask that question in grant applications, but I just find that so difficult sometimes because it seems that it’s based on assumptions of who’s going to be interested. And I can never know who’s going to be interested. A woman who is 54 might take interest in it or a trans person who is 16 might take interest in it, and I don’t have a desire to limit that.
Furthermore, as I was saying at the beginning, the piece was helping me navigate and chart a territory that was very confusing to me because of the traumatic experience of a family crisis. So I was using it as an aid, as a way to help. I think that’s the most honest answer I can give.
ML: The form and writing in this piece feel very spontaneous and intuitive. What did creating this work mean for you personally? And could you talk for a minute about the physical development of this piece? Were there tests and concept drawings? Or did it all spill out to some extent?
HJ: Yes. I think that’s worth pausing and looking at. The piece grew as something unplanned, something out of need. I hold the belief that art has that power that helps us articulate what needs to be said externally, so that we can somehow address landscapes that might be internal. So, all the time, I think that there’s an exercise of transmutation with it. Perhaps other folks approach their art making with more tests, but that wasn’t my approach. I was following a process that was personal, which is the writing of these experiences and not relying on premeditation or plans to execute the piece.
ML: An extension of the prior question, what drove you to share this piece publicly? A bit of the imagery and a chunk of the text is very sexual, and I found myself devising a narrative behind your journey all around the two continents. But there’s also an explicit narrative of trauma, though I don’t think the trauma itself is stated directly.
HJ: Sharing this piece publicly comes from both an invitation from the Dirt Palace, but also from a personal desire to share the work that I’m doing. I have been very intentional recently about sharing more of the things that I do. Because I often don’t. I often keep a lot of processes to myself and, in my experience, it takes a lot of time for something to be presented to other folks. Perhaps because once I do that, I feel like the piece reaches the end of its cycle. And so maybe there’s something in there actually that I don’t want to let go of. I want to keep invested and engaged with whatever piece is at hand. So I perhaps involuntarily or unconsciously refrain from that end of the cycle. But there’s definitely moments in which I think that it’s worth sharing and worth putting out there. And that I think, hopefully multiplies the power that the creative process can have. And based on the conversations that I’ve had since this piece is up, I received a lot of positive energy, a lot of interactions happened because of it. And I’m thankful for that. Very grateful for that and for the opportunity to show the work.
And to the other point of the piece being sexually explicit, I guess that trajectory one could put together from looking at it. It is absolutely autobiographical, self-referential, so there’s no hiding there. And I think because it responds to my own need for making sense of my circumstances, I just followed what I felt like was needed for that based on the things that were happening to me, and how I went about addressing this trauma.
The explicit sexual images are very much a part of the family crisis that I experienced. And it’s something that receives a lot of inhibition from a lot of people. Taboos. And I don't think that makes it easier to talk about the things that need to be discussed. That’s my personal opinion. However, again, sexuality was key to the experiences I had. So it felt like it was a way for me to address it and call it into the picture.
ML: You describe both yourself and your work as queer, which I (also queer) noticed quickly but which others may find a more subtle theme. Is the queerness of your work essential to understanding it? Or do you prefer to offer your audiences multiple entry points?
HJ: My take on the queerness of the piece is almost an afterthought, in the sense that I know queer is the term that better describes my sexuality and my experience of being in this world and engaging with other people on different levels. But I think it comes after my experience. In other words, there’s a tree and then we come up with the word tree for it. And I don’t think the tree cares much what it’s called.
I think it’s similar to my experience in a way, and thinking otherwise can perhaps lend itself to limitations and confusions. I think, perhaps, I am interested in the term queer even because it enhances, creates a more nuanced spectrum for identity than words like gay may allow for. I think the term gay for me has come to actually speak to a very particular identity that I don’t actually identify with so much.
And perhaps it’s similar with my work. I can only think about it in queer terms if I put it at the same level in which I am considering how nuanced the experience of a queer person can be. And how personal it is also. And I think the piece has that, in the sense that it has its own experience to it. In a very stubborn way, it refuses to be prescribed limits. It talks about limits, it talks about boundaries, but it juxtaposes them. I don’t want to do too much explaining, but it is saying that the experience that I’m able to have transcends those clear delimitations. And I think to an extent that’s similar to what terminology I use to describe myself or the work I do. Those things, I think, come at a later stage. In other words, I need to first have my own experience, then find the words to communicate it to others. And some of the beauty of relying on visual media is that I don’t necessarily have to lean on words. Although I do—quite a lot here—but that’s not the only way of creating meaning that’s available to me.
ML: This isn’t specifically about your window, but you have a sailboat, La Luna, that you have been refurbishing and using for spoken/video pieces. Providence is the waterfront city that refuses to accept that it’s a waterfront city.
HJ: Okay, so Luna definitely is an invitation to the waterfront. Intentionally. It’s the way that I can articulate space that is otherwise sometimes even neglected, right? And a place where we, as constituents of Providence, as inhabitants of this area, send things to die and to forget. We think of the water or the ocean as a space that can receive things and we can forget about them. Residue. Everything drains into the ocean and somehow we expect that as a consequence it disappears from our sight, almost with very little account of what happens to that afterwards. But nothing really gets lost.
It’s interesting that you say this city does not acknowledge its waterfront because I have not thought about it that way. But it very much coincides with my home city, the place I understand as home which is Buenos Aires, which is a very big city that is built with its back to the Rio de la Plata river basin that is right next to it. So definitely a separate endeavor altogether from the one we were addressing, but I feel like in order to start talking about it and confronting it and countering it, we need to be situated close to it. We need to bring ourselves to it. And perhaps even experience submission to something that is bigger than ourselves and something that to a great extent actually determines our well-being and survival.
ML: We’re talking just a few days after the expiration of Title 42, the COVID emergency policy that severely restricted immigration to the United States from land crossings in Mexico, but essentially from across Latin America. When developing your work, do you think at all about how it may react to developments and/or future world events?
HJ: I appreciate the mention of this context. Entry to the United States is regulated on very different levels, right? Not just as the border, but through visas that allow certain people to come in and out. And in order to obtain those visas, in a lot of cases you have to meet certain criteria that make the visas accessible only to folks who can comply with the terms that this country imposes for other people to go through. All the time, I’m thinking about how my piece engages in that conversation.
I think perhaps one of the reasons why this particular topic is hot, for me and perhaps other people, is because it articulates a lot of struggle from one side, one that the powers who impose this order negate and refuse to acknowledge –while having a degree of responsibility to it. So there's a breach in conversation, and there’s a big gap in terms of what this country needs to do so that people can heal. Because everything that happens at the borders of this country is dictated by the histories that precede us, and the power dynamics that have been established, and continue to play out to this day. So it seems very important to examine those circumstances in order to talk about it properly.
I think it’s also very important to look at how human rights may be violated by the strong restrictions that are imposed on accessing this country. Human rights in terms of the right for a home, the right for safety, the right to establish a family, the right to seek asylum. And a lot of those things are negated with the current structures, to keep people from entering this country or rather to control the circumstances in which they do, and use that situation to favor the prevailing powers of this country. At the same time, there’s a narrative that places perceived danger on the well-being of the people who are already in this country, and that seems to make people turn against each other instead of harboring compassion and understanding.
I think in order to properly address this flow and this traveling across a territory, we need to be looking at exactly what is being accomplished. And what is being accomplished speaks directly to what this country’s priorities might be. In other words, look at the conditions of the people that are allowed to be here. There’s people with “ankle monitors”, devices that they are not allowed to take off so they can be tracked while they are waiting to be called into court –very similar to how systems of exploitation work. Looking at “what is being accomplished” means looking at the circumstances people are weathering because of the policies in place.
I also feel like it’s important to say that every story of coming into this country might be different. But once again I want to come back to the point of the people in the US needing to address something that they are negating, a piece of history that they are negating, and that they have been instrumental in constructing. So long as people don’t open up to the things that need to be talked about, it’s going to be very hard to find harmony and understanding among groups of people, and specifically to get close to an idea of healing for what has happened across boundaries.
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hernán jourdan explores the wealth of hybrid identities through video, performance and writing. Born in Argentina, he trained as a theater artist (EMBA, EMAD) and completed Film & Video studies at the School of Tokyo Visual Arts, in Japan, as a scholarship recipient of the Japanese Ministry of Education. He hitchhiked extensively across South America before immigrating to Providence in 2014, and for the chronicles of this journey hernán was awarded a MacColl Johnson Fellowship (2021).
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Lawrence edited Law and Order Party, a curated email-based guide to art events happening in Rhode Island. The newsletter included 262 weekly issues from 2015 - 2020, as well as a popular annual summer guide. In 2019, Lawrence’s hybrid fiction/video essay was part of the digital catalog Raid the Icebox Now with Nicole Eisenman: Tonight we are going out and we are all getting hammered, which accompanied Eisenman’s exhibition at the RISD Museum. His writing has also appeared in a number of regional art publications as well as The New Inquiry, The Guardian, and Salon.
