Ceci, te vas a ir?

While Cecilia longs for the other worlds beyond the Quiechapa river, her brother asks if she will leave. The project explores the dreamy, spectral dimension surrounding Ceci's departure from her small rural village to Ciudad de México.

You don’t just pass through Candelaría Yegolé. You either arrive there, or you are born there. Cloistered by the mountains of the Sierra Sur in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, this small rural village of a hundred people is nonetheless far from immobile. Its geographical isolation makes it a place oscillating between the excitement of arrival and the melancholy of departure. The flow of lives leaving and returning reminds of the instability of the Quiechapa river, its current shifting along the seasons and the rains, its waters sometimes limpid, sometimes turbid. Cecilia is a young woman who was born in Yegolé, longing to be carried by the river, seeking the other worlds hiding beyond it.

The propensity for migration toward a more or less distant “norte”, for an eternal or ephemeral moment, makes Yegolé a complex basin of affects. The community sustains itself through the collective organization of campesino labor, traditional festivities and mezcal production. This social nucleus overlaps with the smaller, yet expansive, family one. In Yegolé’s context, family is not limited to blood, but rather extends to the godparents chosen for various religious rites and to relationships of deep affection. It is through the magical spaces of this amplified familiar love that this project was born. Through the privileged bonds that united me to Chilo, Jose, Ceci and Yair’s family.

Since I met her when she was thirteen years old, Cecilia wants to leave. She wants to experience the other worlds that open beyond the river, to emancipate herself from the prescribed role of housewife awaiting her if she stays, and perhaps to continue her studies, to write poems and novels. While many men leave every year to work in the United States, the opportunity to depart is more limited for young girls. This project explores Cecilia’s quest and what she would have to leave behind to follow it. It is an inquiry into worlds that intersect, are dreamt and invented in an era where digital access to a geopolitical elsewhere penetrates both individual and collective imaginations. It is also a sensitive interpretation of the bonds that are confronted to departure and remain suspended in absence, embodied by the unconditional fraternal love between Ceci and her little brother, Yair. Between teasing and mutual protection, the solidarity of this duo is challenged by Ceci’s desire for something else. In this sense, the project offers a thought for those who leave as much as for those who stay, appreciating the emotional complexity required to know how to let go someone, even when we love them very deeply.

To protect herself from the rumors that circulate quickly in the small village, Cecilia did not shared with anyone her dream of leaving. From a curious and vivacious child, she became increasingly silent and mysterious. Over the past year, her family slowly became complicit of her ambitions, until her grandmother took the pretext of Yegolé’s local holidays of the Virgen de Candelaría to come and bring her to Mexico City. Although only about 600km away, the trip lasts almost a whole day with public transportation. The megalopolis represents another world for Ceci, far from the one of Yegolé. Distance becomes an irrelevant data point compared to the disorientation and the anguish, tragic and vivifying, of uprooting.

Ceci, te vas a ir? recounts Cecilia’s last three years leading up to her departure for the city, adopting the surreal and mysterious universe of her dreams and the siblings’ shared imagination. The compositions play on pairs to dialogue both with the power of the fraternal duo and the cycle of life to which it is profoundly bonded. The constant reminder of the dirt serves as a reflection of the affects suspended between the native soil and the host land, while also referring to departure as a form of death. It is a reflection on the importance of human connection and of symbolic and spectral presence as a form of resistance to absence.