Students and community members gathered at the Hanes Art Center on Friday to visit artist Lorena Molina's event, "Balancing Act on Home, Art, and Academia: A Reckoning From the Margins," which was a presentation on Molina's experiences in her home country of El Salvador.
A low murmur vibrated through the gathered audience before Molina entered with a grin plastered across her face.
“But does America love you?” she asked the crowd, officially opening her presentation inspired by the emotions she experienced in childhood. She then shared photos from her family album, displaying her life in El Salvador before she was forced to leave because of civil war.
Molina told the audience that immigration brought a lot of questions, discomfort and uncertainty regarding a sense of belonging in America.
“What does it mean for a country to ask for loyalty and love and alliance from people it doesn’t love back?” she said during the presentation.
As her artistic career progressed, Molina said her work became a form of immense catharsis and release. At Rice University in Houston, Molina was asked to create a public art exhibition. In a piece of performance art entitled “La Tierra Recuerda”, or “The Land Remembers," Molina laid on sharp rocks in El Playón, a volcanic eruption site guerrilla opposition groups used to discard dead bodies from the Salvadoran Civil War.
“At the time, I wanted my body to restore the pain of the space. I wanted to be physically marked by the sharp rocks and the paths my family and I can’t escape," she said during the event.
Although the project was eventually approved by Rice University, Molina initially faced pushback for it, being told it was not happy or digestible enough to a widespread audience. Nonetheless, she stayed true to her vision. She said she is firm in her belief that she cannot separate her creativity from the histories she is a part of — a union that exists in much of her current work, including her ongoing exhibit, “This Must Be The Place,” which captures Molina’s ever-evolving ideas around home and personal identity. Molina showcases this exhibit at various locations throughout the U.S.
Lillian Britt, a senior studio art major who attended the presentation, said she came to Molina’s talk as part of research for her honors thesis, but also for her own enrichment and enjoyment as an artist.
