A labyrinthine video poem: a symbolic and personal map with which the poet reconstructs her process of return: interior pilgrimage, a moving ritual. She reflects on the search for a center, the missing piece of the puzzle of memory, invention we call homeland. She travels, circumnavigates, reacts, returns, reflects, relates, defines herself: labyrinthine poem in video.
As a writer, Pilar Rodríguez-Aranda had always started her videos from a previous script. Wishing to break from this, she decided to create this video as if she were composing a poem. In 2004, after her divorce, she resolved to go back to her native city, Mexico, and kept a record in various formats: video, voice, written notes, and photos. With those bits and pieces, reflecting various moments, thoughts, fears and realizations, Pilar braided a labyrinthine poem (or is it a series of poems?) about returning to one’s own place.
In a way, this video revisits some of the themes explored in her earlier videos The Idea We Live In and Border She Is, but this time, all the texts are her own original expression of a personal and symbolic journey. Moving back but also moving in, and then, going out: a ritual that needs to be verbalized.
Only through the word can the world be defined. As a woman who owns her world by owning her words, can she then leave behind her fears and doubts, all that was constructed around and within, but that wasn´t hers? How exact can she be in reaching such center? Can she get lost circumnavegating a concept? Can she find a way back, or is the return some kind of fiction?
