Forgive or Forget Process - Cotacachi, Ecuador

Hello again from Cotacachi, where we have just 3 weeks left in our 2-month residency. This place keeps getting more interesting as we get more invested in our relationships here. We got a tad bit homesick (we miss you) and regular sick last week, but we are now healthy and back on track toward opening our project to people here in town. We want to take a break from Kickstarter asks and updates to tell you a bit about the specifics of what we are working on!

Throughout our year-or-so thinking on forgiveness, we find ourselves returning to the essential function of TIME in the process of forgiveness. The concept of time keeps showing up for us as one of the core working factors contributing to tangible healing and growth in relationships, societies, family structures, etc. It’s not that time heals all (or even necessarily any) wounds. We know forgiveness is nonlinear. But it seems that time itself keeps disputing the grander concepts of this project. 
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• Does forgiveness ever actually happen in the contractual/transactional manner that we imagine it? Or do we just keep moving on and eventually let things go?
• Will scheduling that emotionally laborious convo with your fellow millennial best friend (post-confrontation, post-therapy) do as much for your psyche as you think it will? Or would it be healthier to let the passing of time untangle your feelings?
• Is divisive conversation surrounding the US election leading our country toward justice-oriented improvements or are we creating new, more durable structures for further oppression? 

We don’t know. That’s the thing. This is life’s way of teetering between passive and active. Forgiveness, forgetting, time, and repentance operate so differently in actuality than the way we were taught to perform these things in school, with a distinct “I” statement, a spoken “I’m sorry for the way I…,” a very clear acknowledgement that cites a real wrongdoing. We find it difficult to pin down concrete confrontations, apologies, mitigations that have happened in our lives and seen follow through, but still we know these things happen. So, where do the memories and feelings go? Do they ever get officially processed, compartmentalized, and packed away in a safe memory attic? Maybe they all fizzle out and get lost behind more urgent emotional impulses. If we can’t forgive, the next best option, the involuntary option, might be to forget. We find the unknowable, the inconsistent, the missing piece of this equation lighting a fire under us. So we’ve decided to spend our time here in Cotacachi (notably our longest residency of the year) zooming in on the differences between forgiving and forgetting. ​

In order to express our thoughts on forgiveness and forgetting over time, we will be devoting large amounts of our own time here to gradually building a sculptural installation. We think, given the subject matter, it’s only appropriate that we take a time-sensitive, time-based approach to this portion of Say You’re Sorry. Here in Cotacachi, we have a garage that opens out to the street. Starting next week, each Call Your Mommer will spend one hour per day every day for 2 weeks in that garage space, working on chores that contribute to the growing visual installation. These chores will be repetitive and productive, while leaving room for creativity. We will be working on portions of the sculpture (wooden blocks connected by rope and fabric) ourselves. We will carve at them, write on them, and decorate them as we see fit, with respect to our experiences around forgiveness and forgetting. Other wood blocks that make up the sculpture will be decorated by people living here in Cotacachi. We are gathering these blocks from high school students, people on the street, ex-pats who hang out at our local cafe, and indigenous Ecuadorians. Over the two week duration of the performance, we will hang these blocks onto ropes—one rope designated for forgiving and one for forgetting. Blocks with two holes in them can also be hung on both ropes, signifying that the conflict at hand lies somewhere in between forgivable and forgettable. We will compile these creative responses together with our own, building them into an intimate display.

The soundtrack to the sculpture is a series of interviews that touches on forgiving and forgetting through the lens of individual experiences. So far, we have interviewed an ex-pat who has lived in town for four years, a German baker who’s two storefronts are community staples, and four members of the indigenous community in Tunibamba, including a community leader. The interview questions ask participants to examine a memory of wronging or being wronged and lay out the process (or lack thereof) of forgiving and/or forgetting. We initially intended to edit the interviews together but through the process of talking to people, we realized that each interview contains a powerful story that stands alone. We now plan to play them uninterrupted, back to back throughout the installation. The two-week build up will result in an opening process showing in the garage with food, music, and casual conversation on forgiveness and forgetting. ​​