Who Am I Where? / ¿Quien soy y donde soy?
Guillermo Gomez-Peña, artist
Rebecca Solnit, writer
Two maps about identity are featured in October. A joint project by Rebecca Solnit and artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña responds to the question "Who am I where?" with a wonderful exploration of the authors' contingent identities and circumstantial memories. "Tribes of San Francisco," by local artist Jaime Cortez, is a cartographic display of vanishing and arriving ethnicities and subcultures that have inhabited San Francisco.
In Pacific Heights, Solnit is "the granddaughter of Trotsky's flag boy," while Gomez-Peña is told he looks like "that member of Santana's band." "Who Am I Where? / ¿Quien soy y donde soy?" examines how neighborhoods, history, and individual institutions work to shape our character, while also extending an open invitation to consider your own geographical identity. Gomez-Peña and Solnit use this piece from the “Contingent Identities” broadside as a point of departure for a night of performative readings from their personal and political cartographies.
