San Francisco, CA. Castro District
Medium: Photograph
Date: 2019
Mariel Miranda
Statement:
For this exhibition I have compiled the evidence of my counter-cartographic response to the 1947 road trip that Simone De Beauvoir took through the American Southwest. Using her book “America Day by Day” as a map, I traveled 4200 km by car through the spaces that she visited, familiarizing myself with parts of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. I worked with photography, writing, video, public intervention, and performance as methods of processing my journey.
This journey allowed for a political dialogue to grow between me–a mexican fronteriza artist–-and De Beauvoir, 73 years after her original road trip. Contemporary notions of territory, citizenship and landscape are explored in our dialogical fiction as I experienced the journey in situ, against the grain, and from a decolonial perspective.