We were very delighted to catch multifaceted Winnipeg-based artist Mariana Muñoz Gomez at her studio amid her tight schedule and deadlines inching closer. Gomez was in the middle of gathering and selecting work as part of a forthcoming group exhibition. The current collected work sees Gomez employing a wide array of media including printmaking, video and elements of sculpture to process and think through ideas of otherness, marginalization,language, and duality of identities. In our below chat with Gomez, she shows us around her studio, the pieces of work lying around her studio she's accumulated over the past year, and what she has been discovering about her own work.
[Gomez had been previously working on a book project that documents her interviews around experiences of immigrants in Canada.]
Public Parking: Tell me how you transitioned from the book format for the interviews into the video
Mariana Muñoz Gomez: Part of the reason was just because of time, I would have to have the books ready by a certain date, and then order them and wait for them to come in. But I'm still thinking about having the interviews as a book format for a future project. The video also allowed for the text fade in and out of each translation, which fits with what I've been thinking about on bilingualism.
PP: Is it multiple individual stories fading in and out of each other?
MMG: Yeah, it has selected text from each interview, so it's one person's story and then later its another person's story. I interviewed four different people who are immigrants to Canada. I mostly talked to people who were between 20 to mid 30s and they all came to Canada at different points in their lives. I started off asking them mostly about memories, or the immigration process, and just anything else they wanted to talk about.
Within the video, each interview gets translated back and forth between English and that person's first language. Then I kept translating back and forth up until the changes that came out of Google translate plateaued.
Gallery Install
Detail of Video work
"It's maybe kind of meaningful how Google can or can't handle different languages. I think it speaks to who uses Google, who has access to it, who is adding corrections to translations on Google."
PP: how was that like using google translator...in terms of having that be the thing that lets people know what's being said.
MMG: I chose Google translate because it's a quick and easy thing a lot of people go to to look up phrases here and there. But it in a way degrades the language more so in some cases than others. For the interview with one of my friends who is from India, I was translating into Punjabi, and when I translated back into English the first time it had already changed a lot. It does a pretty ok job with a language like Spanish...there are some differences between translations but it’s not as drastic as with Punjabi. One day when I was thinking of what I could do with this project, I just started playing with Google translate, I had already been thinking about language for a long time, and I thought this degradation was interesting so I started to incorporate it into the work. It's maybe kind of meaningful how Google can or can't handle different languages. I think it speaks to who uses Google, who has access to it, who is adding corrections to translations on Google.
PP: Oh that’s really true...i definitely see that. It definitely adds another dimension to what you are going for
MMG: Yes, I think it does. It’s the background for a lot of the work.
PP: How did you get interested this area of research?
MMG: I’m an immigrant too, we moved here when I was three years old and obviously there are different experiences for everyone. If you moved here say as a pre-teen or as an adult, you'll have different experiences and opinions about your home country. More or less built-up memories and ties, and even very different connections to your first language. It's just something I think about a lot and something that I’ve thought about more critically about in the past few years.
Gomez's Studio
PP: How did the interviewing come in?
MMG: A lot of times when I start making work, I just jump into it naturally and see what works. Interviewing seemed like an option I could try out to start with. Originally I was thinking about making books out of these interviews, have the interviews professionally translated so they'd be correct, and I was thinking about embroidering on the English side, the intention being to challenge the narrative of marginalization in Western society and to other the English reader.
"I feel like when you are an immigrant as opposed to just moving to a different city or something in the same country there’s kind of a sense of finality; you know that you’ll only see the people you left behind so many more times in your life."
PP: How did you approach people?
MMG: I mostly asked people who I already knew, who are immigrants. When I started the interviews I was thinking about making the book, so I introduced them to the book idea. I had some set questions I wanted to ask them. At the beginning, I was asking for visual descriptions of their home but I'd also let them talk about whatever else came up. With the first two people I interviewed, it turned out that both of them had moved to Canada close to their birthday. A couple other people that I spoke to talked about a shift in identity and kind of leaving part of you behind. Someone else I interviewed talked about how when she went back to visit her hometown in Peru for the first time after having been here for like seven years, she realized it was a totally different context. I feel like when you are an immigrant as opposed to just moving to a different city or something in the same country there’s kind of a sense of finality; you know that you’ll only see the people you left behind so many more times in your life.
PP: And those where things you related to...even though you came here much younger
MMG: Yeah, maybe I can’t completely relate to the sense you leaving part of yourself behind because I was very young when I moved and it was my parents’ choice to move here, but I think I can understand it. Sometimes I think about how it would be like if I had grown up in Mexico, and I think a lot about only seeing my family there every few years. In my case, I’ve been pretty lucky - we’ve been able to visit almost every three years for a chunk of years, and we're going again this year. Some of the people I’ve talked to have had 7 or 10 year gaps between visits with family, or can't or don't want to go back to their home country. And that's probably something that a lot of people who aren’t immigrants don't think about.
