B. L AS CRUCES, NM 1997; LIVES IN L AS CRUCES, NM
Marcus Xavier Chormicle embarked upon his personal documentary project “Playing with Fire” in 2017, when he was nineteen years old. Having left his hometown to pursue a journalism degree, he returned to Las Cruces to photograph his uncle’s funeral and the aftermath of his murder, which remains unsolved. Against a nationwide backdrop of racism and violence, “Playing with Fire” memorializes the significance of this local event, examining the pain, loss, and hardship that has been passed down through the photographer’s family.
By recontextualizing personal photographs, Chormicle asserts the value of his family narrative and the harrowing legacy of intergenerational trauma. He chronicles his family’s struggles to maintain community, kinship, and the transmission of memory despite profound loss, instability, and intimidation. He offers acts of healing in the face of belligerent white supremacy and the cycles of violence that have followed his family from Colonial Spain and Imperial Mexico to their land in the United States of America. Chormicle’s complex approach to self-representation is characterized throughout by a deep sense of vulnerability. In considering the precarious lives of the men in his family and community, Chormicle points to the power structures, the economic imbalances, and the racial injustices that shape lives in the American Southwest.
This installation is part of the exhibition Parallel Lives: Photography, Identity, and Belonging, curated by Maya Benton. Parallel Lives draws attention to complex notions of community and belonging, and in particular how our social and familial relationships have been reimagined as a result of the conditions of isolation and uncertainty imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Photo: Marcus Xavier Chormicle,Our Scar on the Land, 2019