TRASIEGO: The Multiple Voices and Languages of Uprooting and Re-rooting
Come to the launch of Trasiego, an installation by Visual Artist Dafne Blanco-Sarlay and Writer Carmen Rodríguez. The artists will be in attendance and, following a brief presentation, they will be pleased to answer your questions.

Thursday, November 4th, 5:30pm

Marpole Neighbourhood House:
8585 Hudson Street, at West 70^th Avenue, in the heart of Musqueam territory.

Trasiego: Spanish for relocation, transfer, transposition, uprooting and re-rooting. 

šxʷʔam̓ət

hogar                         home

I planted the orphan life

of my exile

in the generous soil of

Musqueam

land

grew

a heart

a tongue        a home

hogar                                                 anew

šxʷʔam̓ət

on the unceded

stolen

unreserved

land of the

Musqueam

Trasiego is a multilingual, participatory installation of poetry, visual and digital art – an exploration of issues related to uprooting and re-rooting, place, migration and memory. Marpole Neighbourhood House is proud to announce that, with the support of the City of Vancouver, the Vancouver Latin American Cultural Centre, Indian Summer Festival and Electric Company Theatre, it will be hosting Trasiego until March of 2022.

ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Dafne Blanco-Sarlay
dafneblancovisualart.com
Multidisciplinary artist, counsellor, expressive arts therapist, workshop facilitator and arts administrator Dafne Blanco-Sarlay was born in Mexico in 1973 and moved to Vancouver in 1996.

Her paternal grandmother, the granddaughter of Black slaves, escaped Cuba and found refuge in Mexico in the early 1900s, while her Jewish maternal grandparents left Eastern Europe and settled in Mexico in the 1930s. These diverse family origins and her own experiences as an immigrant to Canada inform her entire work.

Her solo exhibitions include Body Memory (Main Space), Falling into the Deep Mirror (Firehall Arts Centre) and Walking Towards the House of Dreams (Gallery Gachet), among others.

***

Award-winning bilingual writer Carmen Rodríguez was born in Chile in 1948 and came to Canada as a political exile following the 1973 military coup in her native country.

She is the author of Guerra Prolongada/Protracted War (poetry), and a body to remember with (short stories) and the novels Retribution and Atacama. Rodríguez also has an extensive career as an educator and journalist, including work in adult literacy and popular education, particularly with Indigenous Peoples and other marginalized communities in the Americas.

ARTISTS’ STATEMENTS

DAFNE BLANCO-SARLAY

My art represents the crossroads where cultures converge; juxtaposed realities encompassing history and the here and now; the confluence of numerous worlds into one artistic emergence. I yearn to catch glimpses of the many manifestations of reality that coexist, that wander around me and are waiting to be captured. In the process of recreating them on the canvas or through ceramic sculpture, time and space intertwine and fuse together. I use mixed media in most of my artwork: multi-layered surfaces where the incorporation of diverse textures and the exploration of their expressive capacity and tactile qualities become a metaphor for those juxtaposed realities struggling to emerge.

CARMEN RODRÍGUEZ
I write because I like the challenge of transposing the chaotic nature of Life into the linear, orderly world of language. I like to play around with words – savour them, feel their texture, hear their voices and see them materialize on the page or a computer screen. This is particularly true of poetry – a bouquet of words arranged on a page in such a way that they can evoke boundless images, emotions and ideas.

I also write because, for me, writing and activism go hand in hand. To write is to tell the stories of those on the margins. To write is to release the voices of those who have been silenced. To write is to remember and bear witness, protest and denounce, provoke and propose. Through the languages of poetry and visual art, Trasiego strives to offer a fresh and inspiring perspective on themes related to uprooting, migration, re-rooting and memory; and in doing so, it also endeavours to open a space for reflection and dialogue, while planting seeds of transformation.