Love You To Life | Marie Alarcón
Marie Alarcón (Philadelphia, PA)
Philadelphia Goes Elsewhere Fellowship. June 2019. Museum collection textiles; acrylic, handmade appliqué. 120” x 36” in.
Love You to Life is a banner fabricated out of museum collection that draws on cultures of protest and resistance, decorative folk arts as survival, and religious/spiritual traditions of honor and protection.
In direct response to the site-specific installation by Guerra de La Paz titled 6 Thai Tr*nnies In Heaven (2008), the banner hangs from the center of their installation as a way of both bringing the title to light, as well as a way of attempting to bind the violence of the work. Underneath the banner is a shrine in honor of the artist’s queer siblings, mentors, and ancestors. Within the shrine, members of the queer and trans community will be invited to share their insights on how to best be supported and respected.
Alarcón is a queer gender-nonconforming person of color whose biological and extended chosen family of godparents, aunties, and co-parents are across the gender spectrum. This site-specific project draws on both their physical/spiritual identities, and their documentary and experimental nonfiction background to ask the question of how to deal with shifting societal norms in the context of the museum and how to address systemic violence and its presence in a collection. Love You to Life asks: “What is the relationship between the archive and the monument and how does this work relate to the crises of the monument today?”
Project In Response To: 6 Thai Tr*nnies In Heaven
