Video composed to recontextualize the original print object (letterpress printing on 100% cotton Stonehenge 250 gsm, string) in 2022. Voiceover is taken from the artist’s on-site reading which accompanied its showing in a group exhibition “Bridges + Walls, by Las Pochas Radicales at the q center in 2017.

“My legal name is Daniela Roberts Ragan. I believe there is simultaneously much power to be given and also to be lost through naming. My parents, both born into spaces betwixt and border between, immigrated from different lands to eventually converge in Washington D.C. It was here they chose to name me. Daniela is, apparently, an amalgamation of each of their first lovers' names. I always thought that this was a strange way to name a child, like trying to shroud a light with a magnifying glass. This name casts light from lamps no longer tended, and yet it is my own. My middle name is taken from a grandfather whom I never met. From what little I know, he was a brilliant and toxic man who spoke "better" Spanish than mi abuelita. From the way my mother says this, it's clear he used this to get under her skin. Last name, Ragan. It tastes awful, like a mouthful of pebbles scratching against each other and grinding my teeth. Another name gifted by yet another educated and toxic man, who rescued my father from an Austrian orphanage in the aftermath of the second world war, only to disown him for marrying a brassy and unrepentant Latina, my mother, in 1988. I have never met this man either and yet still I bear his name. Having spent much of my life sifting through the dregs of these unwelcome legacies, the only name I've come to know as my own is del mar. Water may have no memory, but she remembers.

My name is daniela del mar. I am a chilean-austrian quiltrx. I am twenty-eight years old and identify as queer and nonbinary. I believe there is simultaneously much power to be given and also to be lost by putting names to things.

Water may have no memory, but she remembers.

As with naming, the act of building both has much to give and much to discern. Guiding intentions serve and inform the architectural manifestations of these concepts. Their purposes live at the intersection of inclusion and exclusivity—building walls is meant to define spaces and to divide them from each other, while building bridges is meant as a pathway to connect discrete spaces to one other. Both types of construction can shelter and divide, protect and prevent, span and separate, retain and transition. Building one isn't any kind of easy answer to destroying the other; one isn't always inclusive while the other always exclusionary. To be queer is to actively reject complacency with binary explanations of the world. Each of these architectural structures can be built to ensure our survival and each can be dismantled to do the same. I've chosen to unmake certain bridges by naming myself, something that has simultaneously shored up other levees. These are personal defenses against oppressive political forces, ones that seek to drown us by not letting us remember that we—lxs queer and mixed—inhabitants of borders between, are natural architects. We navigate spaces, we walk through walls. We define ourselves through building bridges and lacking them. Intersections are formed and reinforced, identities are built and renovated, stagnant waters are left to evaporate and sometimes be re-circulated.

There may be no record, but the architect will remember.

Our borderlands comrade in queerness, artistry, Gloria E. Anzaldua once said, “Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.’ Wanderer, there are no bridges, bridges are made by walking. And to her call, I would say, “Recolectorx, si existen muros se deshace muros al radicar.” Gatherer, if walls exist, they are unmade by planting roots.