Beso de Avispa
Ximena Prieto melds infant memory with her mother’s corrections and her father’s childhood 35mm experiments
Memory, the familial nucleus. Through Beso de Avispa Ximena Prieto recounts her version of a wasp sting in Acapulco when she was just an infant. As she describes the disappearance of a red sun and the confused feeling of a swollen face, her mother’s interruptions and corrections bring us to their present. Cradling it all is a re-editing of archival 35mm footage of “images of what appears to be a summer of blissful innocence captured by my father in his own childhood.”
(¿No te parece que lo de la avispa es chistoso?) [Don't you think the wasp thing is funny?] Her mother’s voice followed by Ximena’s laughter opens a door left always ajar: recollection. “In creating the piece, it became apparent that the amorphous memory of a wasp sting at the center of the text was a meld of two different moments where childhood joy and safety intertwined with sensorial pain and fear.” As mother and daughter find themselves recounting their experience of a day in the life of infant Ximena, an interaction peppered with giggles and jest, father watches gently, “when he was sixteen, also in Acapulco, another summer, a life before said wasp sting.” Prieto takes us through her waking dream, a sleepy voice invites us on these commingling holidays.
Memory sings itself back into a new reality, fact oozes throughout like the incident’s soft vengeance and is countered by the demonstration of hereditary care. “Ximena, es un a mezcla de memorias,” makes it feel like a flavoursome feat. Mother rectifies but daughter continues to invite you into her musings on a sting “so far removed from adult anxieties that they become a blurred abstraction of fragmented moments. Experiments on Super 8 film echo the attempt to recall lost recollections: the capricious, slippery hooks of memory draw us in and help form incomplete internal narratives as they are laid bare, while simultaneously remaining just out of reach.” Father appears to still be watching, as curious and attentive as he was aged 16 in Acapulco.
Beso de Avispa plays out like an undulating postcard that speaks of the sways and the swings within the arborescence of memory. A new impression trickles onto the family as the passage of time brings them together. The echos of time find speak of a new account of the wasp’s nudge: was it a besito, a kiss, for remembrance?
[*Swipe pages to remember]
Ximena Prieto is a Mexican writer and artist exploring the creation of rituals, inherited memory, and myths through performance, poetry, installation, and film. Her pieces play with merging narratives, challenging fixed identity formation. Her performances and installations have been presented in Mexico City, New York, Charlotte, Turin, and London. An artist’s book with Jill Publications exploring her contrasting relationships with her grandmothers will be presented this year. @ximpriBeso de Avispa (video & script) courtesy of Ximena Prieto in collaboration with Monica Chiapa & Rodrigo PrietoWords: Alexia Marmara