Marcela Casals

Parabola/Parable

Parabola/Parable consists of making graphite rubbings on mulberry paper from a plaster block carved with words in the artist’;s mother tongue, Spanish, and her acquired tongue, English. The words in each language can be read as an individual poem, and for those who are bilingual in both languages, as one piece of writing. In this durational performance, Casals speaks these words as she creates the rubbings. The artist notes, “I have lost much of my Mother tongue and added little to it. The new language that I learned as a young child immigrant is still not genuinely mine, and now, neither is my language of birth, which I seldom use.” In this work, she captures “this feeling of mine and not mine, of that in-between space of here and there, of a sound thread connected to my origins, now fading, through the ancient tradition of gravestone rubbings.”

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*This performance took place on November 15th 2020