Residency Dispatch
dollwork: turning into something else
Gabrielle Civil
Artist-in-Residence
April 1 - April 15, 2023

 “The doll was small, about a foot long, with a cloth body and a 1920s-style, plastic Kewpie face. She was pitch-black like the new moon.”

These words appear in (ghost gestures ) my 2021 chapbook on performance/writing. They also describe one of the dolls looking at me now in Automata.

How do dolls keep time?

This doll is a flashback of centuries, a dated racial icon, and a personal souvenir of  artistic adventures. In 2009, this doll traipsed and frolicked around Mexico City with me. She allowed me to recreate an impossible childhood. She pushed back against local stories of race-blindness. She helped me see myself in & out of place.

I was playing with her then. 
(I played her then.)
How shall we play now?

 *

To learn more about this doll, check out this excerpt
from (ghost gestures) from The Offing.

To see me become this doll: check out this excerpt 
from Muño: fantasía de la negrita (2009).