ana rodriguez bisbicus

With the understanding of migration as the leaving of one place and the crossing over into another, this work focuses on the space of tension that opens up between these two places, this in-between space. The queer feminist writer and thinker, Gloria Anzaldúa, writes in her book Borderlands - La Frontera (1984) about what it means to live in an in-between state: between different identities and places. Anzaldúa uses the term Nepantla to describe this in-between state. Nepantla is an indigenous Nahuatl word and means “to stand in the middle”. My aim was to go in search of Nepantla in Berlin. I wanted not only to find and identify the tangible and visible manifestations of Nepantla, but also to map them. Mapping consists in marking spaces, fixing them, giving them legitimacy. In this work, I face the seemingly contradictory challenge of capturing something that is in an inbetween state.

The mapping is based on my own experience, being at the crossroads of different identities as a queer migrant person of color. You can see the spaces of my everyday life.