rasgos asiáticos: Artist Safe Houses

Houston, Texas, 2021

By Virginia Grise

Growing up in San Antonio our house was often the site people would stay for a day, a month, a year after crossing a border we didn’t agree to or create. As a very young age, I learned in order to speak to each other across lines drawn in the desert sand, the borders created by colonialism, the walls erected by capitalism, we have to be willing to create safe houses for others.

What if, instead of a play, theatre was actually a safe house for artists and organizers and dreamers built by Mexicans, with the wood you bought with arts funding, in the backyard of your comadre, who is also your comrade?

Maybe this is something we can imagine/build together.

I do know: Admission will be free.

Through CalArts Center for New Performance, I met Tanya Orellana and over the course of several years (and many drinks) we landed on the idea of holding onto memories and dreams and stories in boxes and then shipping them all over the world, curating new conversations and performances wherever the boxes went, asking ourselves how space and place effect the very way in which we tell stories.

Through Estevan Azcona, I met the good people at DiverseWorks and the National Performance Network who supported this project along the way (among many others). The building of the boxes were cut short at the onset of the pandemic, right before shelter in place orders were issued. The performance at CNP was cancelled. The CounterCurrent Festival in Houston was cancelled. And though DiverseWorks remained committed to rasgos asiáticos, Tanya and I were forced to re-imagine what a performance in Houston might look like. We decided to create an installation in the train shed next the Rice Silo at Sawyer Yards (100 ft long) as the first box, turning it into a market.

Camarillo, our lead carpenter, built this beautiful structure designed by Tanya. It was the first thing to go up, the last to go down, and the beginning of another arm of this project. After Houston, all the wood used in the installation was shipped to San Antonio, the city that raised me, where we will build an intercambio house near Woodlawn Lak for artists and organizers and dreamers, a safe house, which is not the same thing as a safe space, because building safe houses in this country for artists and organizers and dreamers is in fact a dangerous act.

So very grateful to everyone who has provided me a safe house as an artist throughout the years - in Tucson and Phoenix, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Austin, San Antonio - for the Casa Chuecas, Casa Felizes, Casa Naranjas, Casa Colobris, Mincho's Places, Eastside Mansions, Paris Hotels, Casa de Nuclear Meltdowns, AAA3A, the cubanas, the chicanas, the lesbianas, the mitoteras, and the rabbits.

I do not say it enuf:

Gracias. Always. Thank you.