Collaboration with Poet/Performer Enrique Aviles. This video has its origins as a part of the “video set” for a performance by Aviles, directed by Davis Chung. In the theatrical piece Aviles played the roles of two immigrants to the US (one Mexican and one Korean) who live on opposite sides of a rooming house in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in DC. Subsequently, Aviles and I decided to create a stand alone video using one of his poems. The original footage of the neighborhood was supplemented with images of graffiti he produced and a shot of him reciting the poem in the backyard of his house in Arlington, VA.
The term "palimpsest" refers to a text which has been written upon two or three times, but whose lines have been imperfectly erased, so that different layers of all the texts are visible and mix together.