Moe Penders

Etched in a Score / Grabado en una partitura

2024

Etched in a Score / Grabado en una partitura

Tracing paths in an attempt to comprehend the forces that caused this kinesis. 

How do we record movement? 

What is movement? 

Where can we see it? 

Cartography was used to claim land within a colonial system. 

We used different ways to get around. 

Arborous. 

The wind moves the leaves and makes them crash against each other. 

These pathways are memories, missing beginnings and ends. 

Reminds me of the word ‘Hiraeth’
A Welsh word meaning a yearning for a home or place that no longer exists.

Music generates

Let us walk through sonorously 

Etched on a score is a body of work which is more focused on the process and embodiment. It stems from my previous body of work Cuir. The traces of movement and migration, the movement between languages and spaces, and the movement and language around gender. Translation between all these experiences is constant, the movement there is within perception, in relation to gender, nationality and having to constantly explain what I am or where I am from. I make use of cartography, photography and translation, all systems of knowledge which require precision and are heavily connected to colonialism. My mode of employment moves away from this precision and queers the process. 

The images are created with a large format camera 4x5 camera with a ground glass. This camera tends to be one which follows specific steps, and for the most part needs a tripod. The way I use the camera is hand held, which makes it difficult to remain focused, since it must be stable to stay focused. I try to keep it in the same area or distance as when I look through the ground glass, but once I load the negative carrier in the camera it covers the ground glass and the composition is no longer visible. I am interested in what my camera records in that area, in relation to how I am holding this apparatus, and the expectation of what the photograph it produces is supposed to look like. 

The maps I create are traces of spaces I would frequent in El Salvador, places that were formative to me, but also hold familial history, war politics and queer politics that have influenced migration, fractured dynamics, as well as informed cuirness in El Salvador. The maps lack direction and concrete distances, they can’t guide you to a place, it's a gesture of a movement or a trace between a beginning and an end. These spaces hold so much history whether it be personal or of a territory. The purpose of these maps are to exist as graphic scores and to be interpreted by different musicians. Music is also a language, scores are usually read or translated by a musician. My interest is to have a dialogue with musicians and for them to interpret them rather than presenting a literal translation, what their understanding is of this movement, or the space the maps represent.