Verónica Gaona: In search of a better death
Verónica Gaona (b. 1994, Brownsville, Texas) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working between Texas and Tamaulipas. Informed by her transnational identity and the sociopolitical climate, Gaona creates an ongoing dialogue between her own body and the land to investigate notions of migration, death, and architecture by conducting location-driven research. Her artwork exists at the intersection of digital media, installation, and performance, and it brings to the foreground labor and spatial issues at play in her migrant family experience. Working from the border, she uses her position, as insider and outsider, as a tool to bring migrant spaces to life and center them within the larger debates on migration. In 2019, she traveled to Marfa, Paris and Nantes, France to take part in DUST, a residency working at the intersection of spatial practice, critical theory, and contemporary art. In 2021, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of Houston and currently teaches digital media and an interdisciplinary course.
BEF: Hey, Verónica! Would you tell us a little about yourself?
VG: Thanks for having me! As a border dweller from Brownsville, Texas, a sister city to Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico, I use my situation there as my reference point to deconstruct oppressive paradigms and allow several different perspectives to the surface in my artwork.
I examine the remittance landscape experienced within my migrant family who have frequently relocated to find employment, to finance and, mobilize physical transformations in the Mexico landscape with money earned in the United States. The remittance landscapes are usually distinct elements of built ephemera constructed and altered with migrant dollars. They are found in multiple scales in my hometown, from new ornamentation on the facades of houses to gravesites. These structures, including my own family’s houses, are highly symbolic buildings in Mexico and act almost as stand-ins for norteños themselves. I also look at my family’s grave sites in Valle Hermoso, Tamaulipas, Mexico to materialize the notion of traslados, that is, the remitting of cadavers over long distances for burial in the homeland.
I also explore the consequences of death that took place in the sister cities of Brownsville and Matamoros due to the Migrant Protection Protocols executed by the federal government. I often do fieldwork in the riverbanks to gather material residue left behind in the Rio Grande to explore the fate of the asylum seeker in the riverscape and the connections between their lives before and after death.
BEF: How did you get started in photography?
VG: My curiosity in photography began when my family and I were living as migrant workers in Homestead, a small town near Miami, Florida. Since we were away from home for a while, my father decided to travel to our house in Brownsville to make sure nothing had been stolen or damaged. On his return to the Homestead, he brought several plastic bags full of old photographs and official land documents. At 4 years old, my notion of home was experienced through photographs taken at a distance from it. I remember being very disoriented because home was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. That was the moment I felt there was something nostalgic about photography that paralleled with my desire to reproduce the past back home. Now, the way I explore home has taken many shapes.
In the photographic series, Las casas y nosotros, I explore the remittance house in Mexico, which is the most important built environment change in my migrant family history. The house is evidence of my family’s willingness to migrate to improve our own circumstances, and to disperse family members across geographies in attempting to secure a better life. The photographs propose the idea that remitting, and migration is performative in that the laborer constructs houses, but at a distance across international borders. For that reason, the repeated body gestures attempt to capture the multiple sense of being in relation to identity and place experienced in my family history.
While my family will not see my uncles, who live and work in Miami, Houston and Oklahoma, their homage and presence remain in the remittance house in Mexico. Research into my family’s decision to live and work in the North, their building aspirations, and end-of-life planning in the homeland is undertaken by conducting interviews, reading building receipts, and repatriation papers but left behind to instead make sense aesthetically.
BEF: Something that is consistent in your pieces is the use of the land both as raw material and theme, specifically as it concerns the border. Can you explain why that is?
VG: I’m interested in the circumstances migrants have experienced far beyond the border, so my work is not necessarily concerned with the border but the landscapes across Mexico and the United States. Instead, I use land and my body to draw attention to the social and political networks built by federal governments that put migrants in really vulnerable and dangerous situations.
In the remittance space, land as raw material and concept has allowed me to confirm my allegiance to and identification with Mexico. Even though I long for the homeland, my work indicts both the US and Mexico governments for formalizing and normalizing transnational death. While examining the asylum seeker experience, land and water is gathered from the riverscape to directly draw attention to the incidents along the Rio Grande. By gathering material on site, I approach death and the dead to invoke their presence and absence.
BEF: I can relate with that feeling of indifference between honoring heritage but also holding governments accountable. Do you see your art as activism?
VG: Yes, my work does not exist in a vacuum. Art is very much of the social realm and my artistic practice unfolds in the form of investigation of social, cultural and political circumstances at the border. I usually absorb myself in tasks that are more activist/journalistic such as volunteering in humanitarian crises, field research and investigative journalism which are occasionally at odds with the art world. By using this approach, I try to get a better understanding of the realities faced.
A lot happens during research but it is through aesthetics that I put in motion real world events. It is through art making that I open my sensibilities to the tragic events that have happened around me and convert them into tangible experiences in gallery spaces or performances. At the time of the Migrant Protection Protocols phenomenon, I was working on a video at the mouth of the Rio Grande by Playa Bagdad and Boca Chica Beach where I was exploring a conceptual border in which it considered the sea and the surrounding dilapidated wooden structures. But, I decided to take a break and return to it later because I wanted to use my agency as an artist to materialize in concrete forms the injustices there. I remember news outlets focusing on the border wall and not reporting on the refugees' living situation. The horrific and haunting image where Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his daughter Valerie died while trying to cross the Rio Grande was one of the major events that triggered many of the artworks. I also remember seeing on social media Rodrigo Castro’s body pulled by authorities along the river. And throughout the years, I saw how many refugees remained dispossessed of nearly everything but hope.
Once you start getting the friction of that space at the border and seeing who doesn’t get to cross and dies you start paying more attention. And that's what happened to me, I noticed the connection between my migrant family experience and the asylum seeker experience. Both could not cross borders and checkpoints as easily which gave rise to more transnational death between Mexico and the United States.
BEF: The immigrant experience is one that I know by association, my parents being immigrants themselves, but not one I can say I have personally endured. The privilege to move between borders is one that is not offered to undocumented immigrants and most Americans don’t really think about this outside of what is shown in mainstream media. How do you examine this physical experience as a first-generation Mexican American and translate that through your work?
VG: Both of my parents are from Mexico, my mom lives in Brownsville but my dad got deported to Mexico and lives in Matamoros. Therefore, our family resides on both sides of the border with different immigration status. I have cousins and uncles that can not cross but I also have uncles that have crossed when the border was more fluid. Those who have crossed can not see my family back home due to their status, if they do cross the Sarita checkpoint they won't be able to return back to the United States. And being able to return back to the States after crossing to Mexico is important because they want to continue working in order to send money back to Mexico. It’s very complicated, but you know that saying,"I am a phone call away" well that’s how I’ve dealt with being a first generation Mexican American. By practicing different ways of minimizing that distance between loved ones such as talking over the phone helps with the illusion of them being close again. Video calls, gifts and money also help to alleviate feelings of loss and ambivalence that displacement produces. In my art practice, I comment specifically on those issues to make visible how poor immigration policies affect family units on both sides of the border. The video Una Herida Abierta, has multiple meanings, the red riverscape can be read as a metaphor to my Mexican American identity. Depicting the border as a wound like Gloria Anzaldua once said, “the u.s-mexican border es una herida abierta where the third world grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture” can be seen as a way of knowing and being for myself. Una Herida Abierta, can also be seen as the auditory and visual landscape investigation of the Rio Grande as a physical body that has witnessed political violence against asylum seekers by both the US and Mexico governments. During research on the river bank with my field recorder, I’m focused on gathering the eerie sounds of the border bamboo and the water in order to increase the spectator’s attention and draw them into that space. Back in the studio, I conceptualized the idea of putting a red tone over the river in order to reflect the blood in Gloria Anzaldua’s quote.
BEF: Death around the border is constantly being politicized and your work touches upon that grief from your personal perspective. Why is it important for you to explore death in the context of the land?
VG: In para aquellos que no regresan en vida, siempre está la muerte, I wanted to explore the desire of traslados in family units because it alleviates migrant suffering. Being buried in one’s homeland is the final act of bringing closure to a life of uncertainty. The return to the homeland although after death has allowed my family and I to understand where we belong. It is through death that I’m able to critically understand my identity in relation to the Mexico landscape. Over the years, traslados and burials in Valle Hermoso, Tamaulipas, have happened more frequently in my family and I’ve noticed the ritual has reinforced our connection to the land there, despite the physical distance from it. I think we have been very blessed to partake in mourning and funerary rituals because many migrants lack closure at the moment of death. And as a way to memorialize all migrant life I wanted to make this piece to represent the longing and attachment to the ancestral land.
While conceptualizing the piece, I thought about the difficult task of traveling with my uncle's remains and truck to Mexico, about Oscar and Valeria's death in the Rio Grande, their return to El Slavador and of the unmarked mass graves in South Texas. Overall, I see the notion of land, where families dispersed in life, as where they can also reunite in death and where migrants can rest after a lifetime of movement.
BEF: Who are some of the artists that inspire your work?
VG: My immediate family and uncles inspire the work. They are the remittance landscape experts and I pay homage to them in a few art works. I look at Teresa Margolles a lot, she researches the social causes and consequences of death in Mexico and uses human remains from morgues and transforms them into sensory experiences. I drew direct inspiration from Vaporización, 2001, where Margolles vaporized water used to rinse corpses. When I saw her piece, I imagined the Rio Grande water being vaporized which caused the creation of Eternos (Homenaje a Teresa Margolles), 2020. Even though she works with human remains and I work with human residue, I appreciated how the spectator could encounter death in space. For Una Herida Abierta, 2020 I took inspiration from Gloria Anzaldua’s readings, Luz en lo Oscuro and Borderlands which explore ideas about identity. I also drew inspiration from Sondra Perry’s research on African American heritage, blackness and black femininity. Her work Typhoon coming on (2018) examined black identity as it relates to digital culture. I was fascinated how Perry charged the waterscape with power and thought how I could be in conversation with her while maintaining my own experience and agency. The Remittance Landscape book by Sarah Lynn Lopez also helped me understand the transnational experience more in depth. When I first encountered her book, I connected with her ideas so much that my entire art practice became more focused. I even contacted through email and later through phone in order to express my heartfelt appreciation for her research. Overall, I draw inspiration from a variety of artists such as Oscar Muñoz, Minerva Cuevas, Francis Alys, Ana Teresa Fernandez, Doris Salcedo, Raphael Lozano Hemmer, Cecilia Vicuna, Zarina Bhimji, Gordon Matta-Clark, Hélène Amouzou, Adriana Corral, Juan Manuel Echavarria, Allora & Calzadilla, Félix González Torres, Adam Chodzko, Gabriel Orozco, Bill Viola, Coco Fusco, Guillermo Galindo,Tania Bruguera, Jill Magid, Christian Boltanski, Maria Magdalena Campos Pons and artist collective, SEMEFO.
BEF: You also use performance and sculpture to explore themes around land, time, and the body. Your most recent solo exhibition, para aquellos que no regresan en vida at Elgin Street Gallery in Houston, Texas is a great example of that with your pieces bandejas, arrastrados and eternos most prominently coming to mind. What is the experience and feeling you want the viewers to come away with after moving through these pieces?
VG: I conceptualized the exhibition by bridging together my two-research interests: the migrant worker and asylum seeker experience. Through those specific artworks, I wanted to counter the constant exposure and publication of dead people and crime in the media, which has made people immune to violent acts. Seeing and knowing this, I wanted to re-engage the audience by facilitating aesthetic, physical and emotive encounters with death.The installation or display of the work insist that the literal presence of the spectator is necessary for the completion of the work. For that reason, I wanted the display of the work to be secondary. I was more interested in how the viewer physically enters the space and relates to the material in the air and floor. While Bandejas and Eternos seek to make the viewer reflect on ideas of loss and disappearance by the intangible and ephemeral quality to it. Arrastrado, had a more tangible appearance to it because it’s monumental size aims to commemorate the refugee camp where more than 1,500 asylum seekers lived and waited along the river bank. Even though I only displayed 350 papers because of the lack of funding, I hope to continue the piece with the end goal of making 1,500 papers to reflect the number of lives there. I think exhibiting the work together at Elgin Street Gallery allowed for a better understanding of my practice because the aesthetic quality of some pieces can be read as being concerned with minimalist ideas which I’m not. I’m concerned with the material essence. In the exhibition, I appreciated how the rear windshield piece interacted with Arrastrado and Eternos because both are concerned with death and land but were created very differently. The rear windshield piece has more of a cultural inspiration and positioned the other works that are more sterile at the right level I wanted them to be read.
BEF: Do you see yourself continuing to explore this work?
VG: Yes! I want to continue researching traslados and labor by working with actual family remains and an urn. I also want to continue working on my series of photographs, Las casas y nosotros, since my uncles are remitting money back and continuing to change the house in Mexico. During the construction process, I’ve noticed the exposed steel rods that reinforce the cement and usually stick out from the structure like a crown. The function of the rods is none other than to prepare the house for the future construction of a new plant. With that in mind, I’m thinking of making a piece with rusty rods and glass beer bottles, to materialize the idea of hope that migrant families have in expanding the remittance house.
BEF: Any upcoming events you would like to share with us?
VG: Recently, I participated in Without Architecture, a month-long show featuring twelve artists’ exploring what Montrose’s shifting architecture means for Houston’s queer community. The series of actions were rooted in critiquing the convergence of politics and the built environment curated by Junior Fernandez and S Rodriguez. For the event, I conceptualized para aquellos que no regresan en vida, siempre está la muerte (homenaje a David Gomez) where I staged a vehicular burnout by utilizing an F-150. By burning tire, creating a large cloud of smoke and noise at Mary’s Naturally, where over 300 persons were laid to rest, I mark the site with rubber. With the presence of the smoke, the burnout reincorporated the dead in the living and haunted Houston’s present reality and memory. At the same time, it spoke about the presence and absence after a migrant worker’s departure and arrival to the homeland.
Lastly, in October I have an exhibition at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Tamaulipas along with other border women artists. Sometime in September, I have an exhibit in Austin and before the year ends, I will get published in an anthology called Critical Storytelling on/from with(in) [the] Border(s).
BEF: Thank you, Verónica!
VG: Thank you for taking an interest and sharing my work Brenda!