El lugar de la memoria: Where Memory Lies

Then with that ‘sudden contraction’ in a split of soul and a second of pain: she, the whole of who she has to become, arises from memory, place and responsibilities. From a minuscule and obscure sphere of silence, and salivating over her own body, she awakes to one word while the South of her heart, in an incommensurable and transcultural sound, calls to her: toc toc toc ... with the wisdom of generations and latitudes breaks the silence and speaks in tongues.


Then where does the story begin?
The longing for the most familiar takes me back every time to a repetition, a reenactment of some sort. I rehearsed over and over those daily rituals with my own children trying to reconstruct my version of what was part of my childhood's memories, extending myself through what I know best in this, our new context. Memory, belonging and continuity based on history and those unthinkable events, somehow unnamed that stay somewhere: they will get re-told, over and over again, letting the storyteller continue to unravel and recuperate moments.
Memory gives us context and place, a geographic and historical location with references to the past. At the same time memory places us in an active present, making my actions relevant to this here and now in a space of absolute belonging. Perhaps this is why we, migrants repeating our millennial customs with a sense of attachment, continue to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary so a story then must be told. Within this space are conflicting desires and responsibilities, and constant negotiations take place; here is where memory plays an essential role mediating between geographic and imaginary homes.
For Bennet 'sense memory is about tapping a certain kind of process; a processes experienced not as a remembering of the past but as a continuous negotiation of the present with indeterminable links with the past. The poetics of sense memory involve no so much speaking of but speaking out of a particular memory or experience-in other words speaking from the body sustaining sensation ' (2008: 38). Through my own process of 'speaking out' selected memories, I rebuild as an affective construction a space that contains me; only then this 'space' can be named and pronounced in English and Spanish alike: 'home/hogar.' In A Lover's Discourse, Barthes writes: Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is "I desire you" … on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure. (1990: 73) Reflecting on Barthes's fragments that form his structural discursive portrait brings me to a justification, and to my own linguistic repertoire: the language I own and its intrusion into the domineering English-academic language. My language as a site of loved metaphoric games: 'Language is a skin' and a skin is what you see, seeing is what I speak: of-from-at. I then speak my skin. Because my language is 'I,' English cannot be allowed to overwrite me. My language makes me visible, and every time I trip over mispronounced words and wrong spellings, my subalternity is reiterated.
Nevertheless to be heard, seen and understood I must attain the voice of another. My proposition, then, is to explore an inter-language in an attempt to reconcile both languages: English and Spanish and a creative academic practice. But Barthes continues: 'I cannot write myself … what, after all, is this "I" who would write himself? … All I might produce, at best, is a writing of the Image-repertoire; and for that I would have to renounce the Image-repertoire of writing-would have to let myself be subjugated by my language ' (1990: 99).
In a self-reflective manner I want to show the role memory plays as psychological and emotional sustenance. And through examples from Latin American Australian artists' testimonials, I want to demonstrate how memory also permeates the migrant/exile artists' work. 1 In Emphatic Vision Bennett (2008: 11) argues that the 'affective quality of art' contributes to understanding trauma and loss. In my experience, art has the capacity to change perceptions by triggering reflection and understanding about others.
Artistic practices help to alleviate a sense of fracture and isolation by reasserting their maker's identity, and by facilitating a transition between cultures as well.
I felt seduced by the storyteller role and a strong desire to document the stories of artists I have encountered since my arrival in Sydney in 1984. Toni Morrison's analysis of her role as a writer, and in relation to the slave narratives, autobiographies and memoirs, clearly showed me that what gives us access to artists' lives is found in the intersection between histories, memories and imagination. She states: The exercise is also critical for any person who is black, or who belongs to any marginalized category, for historically, we were seldom invited to participate in their discourse even when we were its topic. Moving that veil aside requires therefore certain things. First of all I must trust my own recollection. I must also depend on the recollection of others. Thus memory weights heavily in what I write in how I begin and what I found to be significant … these "memories within" are the subsoil of my work. But memories and recollections won't give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of the imagination can help me . (1990: 302) The artist's work is the material representation where the factors that make the work unique and express the artist's identity and visibility can be found. Writing in both languages creatively is one form of reflecting on and analyzing our experiences.

Where memory lies
Memory dwells in objects, informs our attitudes and stimulates our senses. Aided by material and symbolic memory, migrants reconstruct and recreate an idea of 'home.' At the same time, this cultural memory, when perceived by others, may generate certain expectations about the kind of artwork or performance that artists from a Latin American background are supposed to produce. 2 For example, some artists were prey to a private entrepreneurialism that took over the spaces and activities born out of culturally specific needs, not necessarily commercial ones. This commercialization or privatizing turned potential spaces for transformative interventions into exercises in the management of difference, one which sustained borders of 'otherness.' To challenge these notions and demarcations, cultural productions must be articulated in such a way as to be relevant to contemporary Australian audiences. As Bal notes, reflecting on borders, identity and exile: Borders are not lines but spaces-territories that are contested and fought over, but shared spaces nonetheless .… Some forms of occupation (colonialism, for instance) can generate a mode of resistance that may enhance survival. In a more cultural dynamic, the negotiation of borders can also be a model for interpretation .… Practices of occupation, resistance, and interpretation-are all forms of negotiation. (2008: 10) In Bal's understanding, borders should not be seen as dividing lines but as places of negotiation and exchange. In my view artistic expressions are a mode of negotiation.
Bal also refers to the fact that experiences such as exile assault the relationship between place and person, and produce strong emotions, such as nostalgia (2008:  cracking and sculpting parts of them, they came to the conclusion that the work had to be done all over again; so in ritualistic mode all the urns were destroyed and buried, and they started the next morning afresh. Lino agrees that the creative process mediates the intensity of artistic collaboration. In the same way artistic processes are the artists' language, creative articulations that mediate between the artists and mainstream culture.
These collaborations are productive because what might for some people be a cultural border that prevents dialogue, is for others a meeting space where creative encounters produce previously unforeseen work.
In the introduction to The Location of Culture, Bhabha urges a move away from: narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments and processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These 'in between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood-singular or communal-that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. (1994: 2) Listening to Lino's stories gave me insights into how negotiations take place in 'in between spaces'; at the same time they are material proof of how artistic practices can make powerful interventions that challenge cultural representations. Colonial discourse may attempt to place Lino and his work within reach of 'dependency on the concept of "fixity" in the ideological construction of otherness' (Bhabha 1994: 66). As Bhabha explains, racial classification through stereotyping is a necessary component of colonialist discourse, for 'the construction of the colonial subject in discourse and the exercise of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference-racial and sexual ' (1994: 67). When Lino arrived in Australia in 1982, his intention was to live off his work as a potter and contribute to his new culture by facilitating an appreciation of ceramics as an art form-in his own words, 'subir el nivel de la cerámica como forma de expresión artística' (to elevate ceramics as another form of artistic expression) (phone conversation 6 April 2009). While filming his testimonial Lino recalled his experience as a new arrival and his first job as a potter: I was determined to live off my job as a potter, so each morning I would look through the job vacancies section of the Sydney Morning Herald, they were saying to me you must be crazy-a potter! You wouldn't get a job as a potter here. There are no potters in this country, you know? This went on for 8 or 10 days and one day I say to [my father in law] you won't believe it but look at what this says: "potter required" and he couldn't believe it either! … I went there … I asked where is the kiln? That is not the job she said, the job is you are going to be seated here in front of the window with a lump of clay and you are going to make pots, but make the pots really slowly. I suddenly realised oh no! I am going to be on show here to attract people into the gallery. At the end of the day I had made all these pots and asked her are we ever going to burn them, oh no, no, destroy them and pack them tightly into the bag and tomorrow when you came back wedge the clay and start all over. I stayed for 3 weeks then I quit and we moved to Balmain. ( 45). In hindsight I recognise that continual questioning helps this process. Expressed in day-to-day interactions, questions that are asked of us circle around the language of origin, the year of arrival, and the reasons for living from our artistic practices versus merely practising a 'hobby.' Once territory is marked by borders, different questions arise that tend to be more inclusive, indicating superficial interest and appreciation of our expertise about everything to do with our countries of origin, from cooking to sports and politics (see Coronado 2003: 117). The host country's questioning of our cultural origins not only creates dissonance but sustains a sense of otherness, constructing us as ethnicised subjects, emsuring that our professional choices, identities and ethnicities become the focus of debate, rather than the work and histories affecting our personal and professional life.
For Arias, we are performed into being ethnicised subjects: By means of performance and in this reiterative re-enactment of our culture, within a space dominated by other more powerful groups, [we] sustain a collective identity … Ethnicity is constructed performatively and functions metonymically. Ethnic performativity is a function of the reiterative practice of regulatory discursive regimes that control the formation of personal and collective identity ' (2001: 81) Reenactments and interpretations of my own 'Latinamericanist' self have similarly required a participatory audience. To call oneself Latin American in Australia implied in the 1970s and 1980s that one was an expert about some cultural form or another. If one did not play guitar surely one could dance tango. A different dish must be cooked each week in order to merit the title: 'expert.' But if unable to deliver the dish or the entertainment, we Latin Americans became prolific lovers and, in true revolutionary spirit, embraced the Sydney Latin Myth, roaming the streets of the city into the early hours.
Alongside the ongoing reconstruction of ethnicity in and outside our personal-familial spaces, memory plays a crucial role in the reconstruction and sustenance of identity. As

Willis asserts:
Cultural identity is certainly about the maintenance of the self as a separate and viable force, irreducible to institutional role, ideological definition or dominant social representation. But the meaning making involved is not free and open but intrinsically framed and constrained, as well as enabled, in specific and contingent ways, by powerful external structural determinations. (2000: 4) Memory is dynamic; it carries and plays distinctive social and cultural functions and makes past histories relevant and contemporary, while offering another dimension of understanding to the act of ethnic performativity, particularly in relation to art practices.
The relationship between memory, cultural self or identity, and ethnicity is complex, and further modulated by displacement from one's culture. Whether one is a migrant, traveller or exile by choice or force, many possible 'structural determinations' are at work in these relationships. Observing and challenging those determinations is one way of understanding the importance of self-representation for Latin American artists in Sydney.
Gabriela Coronado, reflecting on the emotional sustenance required by migrants, argues that memories play an undeniable role in sustaining a sense of self: La importancia de los recuerdos es innegable, y en el contexto migratorio adquieren además un valor central como sustento emocional, para uno mismo y para el reforzamiento, o no, de los vínculos con nuestros espacios sociales y afectivos. Representan un anclaje con nuestro pasado y nos conectan con aquellos que se quedaron.
The importance of memories is undeniable, and within the context of migration they acquire a central value as emotional sustenance, to oneself and as reinforcements, or not, of social and emotional bonds. They represent an anchor to our past and connect us with those who stayed behind. traditions, musical instruments and artefacts. Above all they arrived with lived memories and stories, real and fictional. Sydney was ready to see the spectacle, take part in it, pay for it and embrace it from every angle. Newly arrived Latinos realised that to proclaim themselves Latin American exiles and artists was not disadvantageous, and they were not considered 'less professional' or mere amateurs. In the new environment artistic expression was indispensable for facilitating the transition between cultures.
Willis states that everyday creativities and their sensory affects, which penetrate us, can be imagined as a culture 'thinking' for its members; these penetrations guarantee the longevity of the cultural form: 'They are not simply autonomously meaningful in an enclosed and cultural world, but meaningful with respect to context' (Willis 2000: 35).
Artistic expressions work as sensory penetrations and at their heart are the memories mapping our histories. Visual, sound, performance and other modes of art-making mobilize affect, reasserting or validating our memories and identities. As I enter spaces where artists from the Latin American community perform, memory stimulates my senses; even when I feel nostalgic or melancholic I am at ease, at home. The arousal of past memories and experiences softens the tensions emanating from our daily performance of multiple roles. This sensation, a sensual rather than cognitive one, is as personal as it is collective, without necessarily confirming the existence of a common migrant-artist imaginary. Artistic expression reiterates and reasserts a sense of belonging that is normally absent in daily life: proactive cultural interventions occur in the specific spaces that enable a culture to think. There memories lie.
In Sydney and the surrounding region a number of such spaces exist. Located within the

My recollections
Todo está escondido en la memoria refugio de la vida y de la historia (Everything is hidden in memory, refuge of life and history). Song by León Gieco.
Image 5. until the late 1990s our common language, rather than English, was predicated on our memory of who we were and how we were to continue our cultural politics outside our countries of origin.
As a newly arrived migrant coming into a contrasting culture with a language different to my own and very different social dynamics, I noticed that the Latin American families I interacted with during my first years in Sydney would repeat the same daily practices as those performed in their countries. During the first year after my arrival I moved between three different households. An ethnographic account of one family would have shown the following. This family consisted of a father, mother and two daughters who attended high school and worked casual jobs. Every morning the family would leave the house after breakfast to attend to their respective activities, the father to the factory, the mother to a cleaning job, the children to school. In some cases factories provided English language courses and there were also other 'English as a second language' courses that migrants attended after working hours. In most cases, however, We had them all, the Victor Jaras and Ché Guevaras, true protagonists of revolutionary causes; with our capacity for reinvention, and thanks to so much poetic license and magic realism, we played, dressed and acted such roles. There were times when one had no need to finish a sentence; our interlocutors would conclude it in the most tragic and romantic manner. Romanticizing our 'Latinidad' was not purely up to us; but it was a construction suited to the times and place. Latin America was not totally unknown by Walking through pitch-black nights Among rabiosos perros and their barking.

Missing Hermosillo, Sydney, Tepoztlán
And all at once.

Missing the nearby the far away
And the far close.
Mario Licón Cabrera was born in Chihuahua. He worked as a professional photographer and writer, and toured with a famous Mexican performing troupe as a puppeteer before arriving in Australia in 1992 and settling in Sydney. Since then he has continued his literary work. I asked Mario: What does it mean to be a poet? He answered: 'It is as if I asked you what does it mean to be alive? One has to breathe, it is who I am as you are who you are and to be alive you must breathe.' His poem, 'Hermosillo City Blues,' shows the complexities at play when memories take us to the many geographical locations along the trajectory of one's life. The transient artist's chronology is never lineal. There is no beginning-middle-end, accompanied by the weight of ancestral physical signifiers and referential points that surrounds our present moment in our present physical space. All the elements drawn by memories sustain us emotionally and psychologically, reassuring our sense of place and identity. In Mario's case, the role of memory summons the past to the present and the complexity of his daily interactions is shown in two languages, English and Spanish.
His poem begins with a recollection, 'Those nights at Hermosillo,' and the reader is prepared to enter a memory that will be expressed in both languages: 'Among rabiosos perros and their barking.' And as the poem and the night evolve we are taken through a nostalgic trip between Mexico and Sydney, a journey that will end in contradictions: 'Missing Hermosillo, Sydney and Tepoztlan all at once. Missing the nearby and the far away and the far close.' Memory reinforced our sense of place and who we are, in Mario's case his life as a poet, writer and translator. There is a constant tension between who we are, what our work represents, and how that work is valued or taken into account. Who determines how relevant this work is, challenging the artists' identity and how they choose to express and produce their work? All artistic expressions confront some level of resistance, opposition or categorisation. For the writer language becomes another mode of complexity. In most cases Australian Latin American writers are published in their countries of origin, and in Sydney by Cervantes Publishing, a well-known publishing company that, since its founding in 1981, has supported bilingual publications in Australia from Spanish-speaking journalist and writers.
The artist's capacity is to see what is not evident. When we entered this new culture we had to learn its ways, manners and whims. Carlos saw this culture almost as an empty canvas and learnt it through his drawing pad and pencil. Mario sees his physical detachment form his place of birth and his bilingual capacity as enriching him as a writer.

Walter Rojas: En el ojo de la cámara-Through the eye of a camera
Another example of transformation and creativity is the way in which Walter Rojas, a professional oboe player, once in Sydney learned new skills by taking on the camera to document his community's cultural and political activities. Argentinean folklore music, while Carlos Barrios spontaneously painted to the music. In recent conversations I asked Walter about these early beginnings: Se inicio en 1994 un proyecto que se llamaba Nueva Imagen en Bankstown Community Housing Association y allí había un fotógrafo Salvadoreño reconocido que había trabajado en los periódicos en el Salvador y le propusieron hacer un programa acerca de la cultura Salvadoreña y no conocía a otro artista y yo era el único artista en Sydney proveniente del Salvador que había estudiado música y arte el único artista que había era yo-Los demás eran músicos pero no eran artistas entonces éste compadre, Luis Aguilar me invitó a participar del proyecto fotografía y música esa fue la idea central de exponer sobre la cultura Salvadoreña. (Walter Rojas, Bronte, July 2009) In 1994 a project titled New Image begun at Bankstown Community Housing Association and there was a renowned Salvadorian photographer who had worked in the Salvadorian media and they proposed to him to run a program about the Salvadorian culture. And he did not know any other artist and I was the only artist in Sydney coming from El Salvador who had studied music and art, all the others were musicians but not artists. Then this comrade, Luis Aguilar, invited me to take part in a project involving photography and music and that was the central idea how to display Salvadorian culture.
By 2009  artists who migrated to Australia between the late 1970s and the late 1990s. To recuperate some of these stories in the form of testimonials allows me to translate a desire to show and express who we are and how we work into a language that the cultural mainstream can understand.
In this way I want to challenge the notion of a fixed ethnic object, while exposing to full visibility Latin American subjects in constant motion, action and change, with memory sustaining our identity. The testimonials I gathered have shown me that artists acknowledge that the memory of place is pivotal in their artwork's conceptualisation and production in a new cultural context. Arias claims that testimonials allow us to express our subjectivities in a way that is true to our own modes of expression, since it uses our choice of aesthetics and language: 'Testimonios are often a first attempt to frame a rhetoric of being and to name agency for a particular subaltern group .… Their argument is framed in an ethical insistence on the right of subalterns to be themselves and thus implicitly defends cultural plurality or hybridity. Ethnicity is a language-and power-driven self-awareness ' (2001: 80).
At another level I recognise that Australians have developed an appreciation of different artistic practices and aesthetics. They have come to terms with diverse cultural interventions not directly related to this country's indigenous history and legacy of colonisation. These cultural interventions, which I call permeations, do not perform ethnicity or simply represent difference or otherness; rather their impact rests on occupying a space of understanding and sustained integrity of practice, which contradict preconceived government agendas and definitions of ethnicity. Bhabha asserts: The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with 'newness' that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent 'in-between' space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The 'past-present' becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living. (2004: 10) The artists' works are encrypted with their makers' identities and, therefore, their memories. But these articulations are embedded within a space of present temporality, claiming and asserting a new sense of place and belonging while 'renewing the past.' In a sense a story begins in that precise moment with someone picking up the line another left, with decisions to tell and continue the writing. One audience member mentioned that when he heard on the radio that Piazzola's work was going to be performed live, he decided to travel from his country property on the outskirts of Canberra into the city, since he had been a fan of the work for many years.

Jorge y Marcela: En el cotidiano arte del hacer-In the daily making of art
The audience was a mix of ages and cultures. It was impossible for me to witness such a transcultural experience without thinking about the work's production. I recognised members of the performing troupe, and knew in detail, through my past experiences producing and directing performances in cross-cultural contexts, how enriching and complex these experiences can be. Yet as a member of the audience and community, my feelings ranged from an enormous sense of pride to frustration. I was aware of how the quality of the work could have been improved with better conditions.
These conditions are not always the result of limited funding. If the telling of a story is perhaps the telling of many stories, then Jorge and Marcela decided to unfold one story by means of theatrical and musical language.

Conclusion
Valuable cultural memories are embedded in the cultural work produced in the Australian Latin American community. Performances, art works, and cultural spectacles and spaces, are symbols of identity directly connected to the perception and appreciation by mainstream Australians of Latinos and their cultural productions. Exiled Latin American artists transform themselves through innovative art practices that allow them, and their communities, to deal and negotiate with a profound sense of being unrooted. The loose mapping in this paper of selected Australian Latin American cultural achievements and stories indicates the extent to which art productions are also 5 One unfortunate absence was the bandoneón-a type of concertina, and a pivotal instrument in a tango orchestra-for economic reasons rather than due to a lack of skilled performers. testimonials of our community's cultural memory. It is here, then, in an attempt to recuperate what was lived, that a story begins. As we move from one country to another we carry with us a cultural identity, and an idea of place, that enable our creative practices to continue. Memory, dynamic and in interactive dialogue with others, sustains us in this journey. Artists from distinct cultures to the dominant one they encounter in the host country must always validate and justify their locations and choices of art practice. Tensions arise through a constant questioning of one's origins, and skills, which may diminish the relevance of our art work in the context of mainstream Australian culture. Nevertheless, the artists introduced here continue to engage at many levels with both mainstream professional practices and community or grassroots contexts. They are in motion and interaction, transcending culturally specific boundaries, continuing to negotiate our sojourn in this country.