Diasporic Worldings: Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda

Diasporic Worldings is an experimental video by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda that explores the experiences of people in the diaspora as they form and imagine relationships with land, place, territories, and ecosystems. It uses the term “diasporic” as an adjective to describe those who belong to a diaspora due to either forced or voluntary migration and “worlding” as a creative process where “worlds” develop through ongoing engagement and interconnections with humans and more-than-humans. Inspired by Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant’s distinction between archipelagic thinking as fragmentary and intuitive and continental thinking as all-encompassing and systematic, and Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza’s use of frottage drawing as a mnemonic technique to recover an embodied connection to place, the video features actions performed on camera and images involving different approaches to map-making.