This MFA exhibition thesis explores the relationships between borders, embodied memories, ghosts, and non-linear narratives through practice-based research that incorporates drawing, installation, and performance. The body of work utilizes the space as a site of memory and storytelling, where the viewer walks, remembers and stitches together fragments of a larger story. Using multiple drawing strategies and installation approaches, the exhibition raises questions about the representability of the haunting, the narrative strategies of impossible stories, and the absence-presence of the body from the art work. The frame of research that resulted in my exhibition focuses on the complex experiences of haunting on the Frontera Sur, the Spanish Mediterranean shore: from the ghosts of those killed by the Francoist dictatorial regime to the more recent ghosts of those killed by EU immigration policies, workers exploited in the fields, the policed bodies of women and queers. This borderscape, with its millions of sunbathing Spaniards and tourists is a site that contains iterative hauntings. Employing North American and Hispanic authors, this research considers the haunting as a resilient response emerging from systemic violence, as well as an insidious systemic leaking from previous oppressive regimes.

Keywords: haunting, drawing, ghost, Mediterranean, Franco, Spain, migration, cultural memory, borderscape, storytelling, state violence

• Author