Talismán | طلسم

Jorge Alejandro Rodriguez Solorzano

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Talismán / طلسم pieces together journal and dream fragments that return to my childhood home in Guadalajara, which I left in 2006, a year that coincides with the advent of Mexico’s War on Drugs. This house was home to hundreds of reflective surfaces: vitrines, mirrors, glass and porcelain sculptures. Collectively, they opened a link between living and non-living worlds, where miniature dolls came to life and where surreptitious and uncanny apparitions were ordinary happenings. The piece explores how diasporic recollections are often engaged in the taming of the fundamental disorder of memory, and how the anality of recollection is overcome by the excess of the real, which is of and in our world, as its shadow. My recollections of this home often attempt to stabilize the near beyond contained within, but in dreams I am more attuned to the disorder, the mastery of non-mastery in this childhood world that is a vitrine of its own. In a recent dream, I made a return trip to this house accompanied by a talisman I was given to protect me from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in the EWR airport border checkpoint. The talisman is a powerful object, possibly dangerous if used without knowledge or care. In my dreamscape, I experienced proximity to the near beyond of diasporic return. But the talisman I wore around my neck was pulling me somewhere else, eventually leaving a burn around my neck when I woke up.

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