Our voices together, bouncing off the walls

M_Othering text by curator Abbra Kotlarczyk

Lucreccia Quintanilla’s reconfiguration of a sound work produced as part of the 2018 exhibition Family Grimoires: The Diaspora Fantastic (curated by Diego Ramirez for Seventh Gallery) becomes itself an echo, situated within a practice concerned with sound as a mode of knowledge transference through various impulses of diasporic space-time temporality. For this iteration entitled Our voices together, bouncing off the walls (2019), Quintanilla has hand-stitched and precariously draped a synthetic and temporary cave-like cubby structure as a kind of fraught but effectual echo-chamber. As itself a reiteration, this work—which sounds out attempts at translating Indigenous Lenca words from her native El Salvador, back and forth between herself and her young son— signals the complex space of removal within a five-hundred-year process of colonisation. Where Wayne Kostenbaum declares “the internet is everyone’s mother” [ref] this is perhaps no more true than confronting the futile task of attempting to authentically reconnect with displaced Indigenous lineages via the reductive and superficial tendencies of You Tube.