The Terrestrial and the Celestial: A Conversation with Mercedes Dorame

Published by Monument Lab | January 18, 2022

From the conversation:

JD: As you discuss these very personal experiences that have influenced your practice, it underscores how your object-making always operates alongside your efforts to reclaim, recode, and recontextualize Indigenous objects, materials, and land. You demonstrate great care for the forms of cultural heritage that these things can carry. Can you speak more about how you see the lives of these objects, materials, and geographies as connected to the lives of Tongva communities not just of the past, but also of the present and future?

MD: When I first started working with objects not in a photographic way, I brought in things that had been passed down, or things like a stone, or a shell, that I had collected from sites of cultural or personal importance. I got interested in working with what I call “star stones”—which are technically called cogged stones—when I worked on a site where many were found. They’re incredibly beautiful and intentionally made and specific to our tribal area and our immediate neighbors. But, we don’t know what they were used for, so there’s this disconnect of their story. Again, this story wasn’t lost, it was taken. Since they’re such incredible objects, this disconnect points to the severity of that taking.

For me, these stones are about star mapping. I’m not saying this is the official Tongva verdict on use or meaning, but it speaks to that ability to create meaning. Working with these objects, sculpting some myself, and allowing them all to be seen in the world...it’s about re-empowering them and myself to tell a story in a way that’s about imagination. I intentionally use the words “cultural belonging” over “artifacts” to describe them. When you say artifacts, you think of things of the past, but cultural belongings have connections to the living, breathing community that still exists in a place.

Detail of Mercedes Dorame, Pulling the Sun Back – Xa’aa Peshii Nehiino Taamet, 2021

Installation at Los Angeles State Historic Park

Photo by the artist