space is always needed
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“The aim of my work is to open up space.”—Gabrielle Civil
I read In & Out of Place in December of 2024. It would be the last book I read in that year, that year that already feels like it was eons ago. I posted on bluesky that I was aware it would probably be the last book I read in 2024, and I was glad, because I needed it exactly then.
I always need this book, though.
As I read it, of course I occasionally wound up thinking back to my own (one) experience in Mexico. In January 1997 I was twenty-three, and for several months had saved up money. I left my job at the front desk of a small carpet cleaning business, and flew to Mexico for a month, alone. Civil’s time in Mexico was in 2008-2009 on a Fulbright fellowship project. I had decided to go because I felt weird that I hadn’t yet been (not counting one underaged night in Tijuana). I was a Mexican American who had not been taught Spanish by my parents, but by school.
My journals from that time begin with a description of being in a bus terminal in Mexico City, as though I had teleported there, and end with me Acapulco sunburnt in a hotel in Mexico City once again, yearning to go home to be with the lover I left behind. By the end of the trip I was dreaming at night in Spanish. Mexican people I encountered often assumed I was from Italy, or correctly knew I was from the U.S. The fact that my paternal grandparents were from Mexico, that I identified as Chicana—these identities were lost in my interactions. I was not yet aware of everything I would find later as an adult, the documents on ancestry websites that could fill in a picture not even my own father had about himself and his origins or my mother and hers. There are, obviously, numerous striking differences between my experience in Mexico and Civil’s, but this book reminded me of all the ways one can feel in and out of place.
Civil, a Black feminist performance artist and writer, says on page one:
“In Mexico, my race, my body, my preconceptions as a black woman artist, were both in and out of place. My experiences of these new and different ‘sensations, states of mind and…profound reaction’ stimulated new possibilities for my conceptual and performance art.”
Civil’s book is replete with multi-dimensional narratives that appear in various forms: emails sent to a friend; poetry; notes from a performance class; notebook writings; photographs of Mexico and of her performances; short essays by other artists reviewing Civil’s works in Spanish, with translations; Civil’s notes on others’ performances, work, and human behavior. The book itself, its form, feel like the ultimate wish fulfilled, a generosity in book form that can hold it all: differing fonts; red, pink, yellow, and blue pages; ALL CAPS, thickly bolded text; the photos, and the ex-votos that Civil commissioned that appear in the book.
Civil allows us into vulnerable places, where romantic interactions inspire questions and confusion, while also ushering us into more understanding of ourselves, like when you learn more about what you want when you don’t have what you want, or when you taste what you want and want even more. As I reread my own journal from my month in Mexico, I wanted to edit out the questions and confusions I was ruminating on as I travelled. Subsisting on occasional phone calls with the lover at home, daydreaming about them, or about what it would be like to have a new lover on my travels, feature heavy in that journal. In & Out of Place created space for me to think about leaving my old travel journals (and vulnerabilities, laid so bare) alone: they are a point in time where the feelings and longings and dreaming are wrapped up in the mental space I was in as much as the landscape. Riding the second class bus for hours, yellow, cacti-spotted land for miles in every direction with Björk on my headphones. The quiet, nightly orgasms the two weeks I stayed in the pink-walled bedroom adorned with crucifixes.
“WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT MYSELF IN MEXICO CITY BY GABRIELLE CIVIL (from my notebooks)”, a four page, bulleted list offers so much, everything from “I like, need, and struggle with being alone” to “I’ve learned that I’m ambitious” to “I’m another person in Spanish” and “I’m another person in Mexico. (This is both good and bad.)” It made me think of my much shorter list, in Hollywood Notebook, chapter 46, a brief collection of things I learned from my time in Mexico, such as “How to find a hotel circled in a book with no maps,”“How to not fall in love with an attentive person you meet on your travels,” and "How to find a beer and a bottle opener by the light of the street lamps in downtown Guanajuato.” I haven’t given myself the proper amount of time or space to flesh out that period in writing. Here again is where I find myself grateful that reading Civil’s work (again, as with her other books), opens up space.
Maybe the strongest way this book opened up space for me came from the places in the book where Civil shared her processes, as well as what sound like emotionally challenging, painful interactions with other artists or audience. Her writings about the mercurial La Congelada de Uva, a contemporary performance artist, were hard for me to read as a fan and peer of Civil’s—and it was also immensely generous of her to share these rough experiences, as well as how she processed them, whether in emails to a friend, or metabolizing them to create new work.
So when I say I needed this book at the end of 2024, it’s because Gabrielle Civil succeeds in her aim to open up space. Her work continues to make me excited about making art, about maintaining my writing practice, even and especially in the face of fascism. It reminds me that opening space up for others can be its own revolutionary work: essential, stealth. Writing so deeply and openly about personal processes of art and life, the attempts made, the failures, the successes, has the power to open up that space. Civil’s body of work, beautifully and generously, opens up space to her audience and readers.
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