Visualizing Precarity and Security: Mona Hatoum’s Drowning Sorrows and Guadalupe Maravilla’s Walk on Water

Catherine S Ramírez

doi:10.5070/r74155775

Abstract

Precarity is an overwhelming and persistent condition of unpredictability, instability, and insecurity, especially as related to employment, housing, health care, and migration status. While spread unevenly, it is a hallmark of our contemporary world. At UC Santa Cruz, a federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution where more than one-third of the undergraduates are first-generation college students and more than half receive need-based financial aid, many of my students are of the precariat, the people for whom precarity is a driving force. Like intersectionality and heteronormativity, precarity allows us to name, to better understand, and then to change the conditions that shape our world. And like intersectionality and heteronormativity, it is an abstruse concept. To help my students identify and comprehend precarity, I have found that it is useful to visualize it. To do so, I turn to art, specifically to Mona Hatoum’s Drowning Sorrows (20012) and Guadalupe Maravilla’s Walk on Water (2018).

Highlights

Precarity is an overwhelming and persistent condition of unpredictability, instability, and insecurity, especially as related to employment, housing, health care, and migration status
At UC Santa Cruz, a federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution where more than one-third of the undergraduates are first-generation college students and more than half receive need-based financial aid, many of my students are of the precariat, the people for whom precarity is a driving force
I turn to art, to Mona Hatoum’s Drowning Sorrows (2001–2) and Guadalupe Maravilla’s Walk on Water (2018)

Summary

Voice of Visual Studies

Visualizing Precarity and Security: Mona Hatoum’s Drowning Sorrows and Guadalupe Maravilla’s Walk on Water. Precarity is an overwhelming and persistent condition of unpredictability, instability, and insecurity, especially as related to employment, housing, health care, and migration status. While spread unevenly, it is a hallmark of our contemporary world. In April 2020, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) classified farmworkers as essential, even though roughly half of farmworkers in this country lack legal status While these migrants were deemed essential by the very agency charged with hunting down, rounding up, incarcerating, and deporting them, they were denied federal coronavirus aid. Include those migrants in our visions for a world in which all have security? These are some of the questions with which I approach Drowning Sorrows and Walk on Water

Drowning Sorrows

Findings

Walk on Water