This is a series interview with my immigrant friends. Each of each contains different content but in the meantime similar in a way. The total run time of each video is around an hour. Feel free to treat it as a podcast or background music and discover the surprise moment in it.

Daniela Stubbs-Levi is a Peruvian artist, poet, and musician based in New York City. She received her BA in Graphic Arts from Toulouse Lautrec in Lima Peru, and later a BFA in Visual Arts from the University Paris VIII in France. Stubbs-Leví was born in Berlin, raised in Lima, studied in Paris, and currently lives in New York. Her sense of displacement informs her work and leads her to embrace and delve into the relativism implied in the act of remembering: memory is not a fixed device but more likely an ever-changing frame with which we measure reality. She is interested in dissecting music as sound — a pivot balancing between language and meaning— and notations for their use in different contexts that explore the nature of time and its connection to emotion. She uses mediums such as video, photography, sound, drawing, and writing as individual voices that coexist giving each one space for dialogue.

https://danielastubbslevi.com/

During the interview, she mentioned something that’s haunted my mind. She mentioned Anne Carson’s lecture about stillness which talks about immigrants as a quote because we are the quote without context. Anne Carson references the Antigone by Sophocles, how Antigone was put in the dark cave(Tomb) and became a metic that changes her status to be an immigrant, someone in between. Antigone was pulled out of the status neither alive nor dead, she was foreign to both of them. Giorgio Agamben also said, “to cite is to pull it out of the customary meaning but refused to let it settle to the new meaning”.

I like how Daniela introduced what she did was finding or be something in between. I had a friend like that too, who’s no long in U.S. but that had me thought about the feeling of hesitation and how powerful it could be.

In my research I was looking into lies, something not real nor fake, because all the lie you told was already in the memory and they might become real during the time it was told. Talk with Daniela remind me of different aspect of my lies, but to put them back into the context of my creation will erase the unsubstituted status. In that sense, I am the King Creon and I let my project or my immigrant status dry as Antigone at the cave. I quote it all the time because I couldn’t think it through…

Many thanks.