Tracing Images of Precarity: Sketching, Mourning, and a Relational Making Practice

Abstract

This paper explores an arts-based research practice of tracing the image of two Salvadoran migrants, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 2-year-old daughter Valeria, drowned in the Rio Grande in 2019. This practice came about while writing a manuscript about images of children's and immigrant's precarity. Through an embodied, repetitive, and solitary practice of tracing that engages in a postmodern ethics of difference and distance, I consider the co-constructedness of the human condition and how my practice ultimately became an act of relationality and mourning.