books as bodies or bodies as maps

Faune Ybarra's MFA Defence
Thursday, October 7, 2021 | 2:30 PM | Zoom | RSVP to sca_gpa@sfu.ca

Since my move to so-called Canada in 2015, I have reconsidered the way in which the places I have dwelled are bound to the temporal materialities around me. Through my transits in Mexico City, Oaxaca, Corner Brook, St. John’s, and Vancouver, I have come to conceive my body as my primary tool of creation, a site for translation among different systems of value and belief. In books as bodies or bodies as maps I explore this entanglement of embodied relations by repurposing the book as a body and the body as a map. Repurposing Sonja Boon’s biographical novel What the Oceans Remember as a pinhole book/camera, I took photos along the Vancouver shoreline as a gesture of acknowledgment to the water as the common feature for untold human and non-human stories. Resisting containment, I present the documentation of the places I have collected on walks over the course of 2020-21 in postcards, booklets, a map, and a three-channel video. This is the first iteration of an unfolding project in which I constellate and document the places I have transited through (sometimes as a “temporary resident”, sometimes as a citizen) in an attempt to re-see the book as a re-writing device that ultimately affords readers the agency to drift.