INCA: 2 West Roy St. Seattle, WA, 98110

Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, David Huffman, Nadia Myre, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Justen Waterhouse

I crossed oceans and histories to speak with you—it is hard work.

The Crossing Over Place is an exhibition about negotiation. It is about navigating irreducible and unresolved cultural and racial borders. Featuring artists who cross these borders, this exhibition invites viewers to consider the alienating and strategic labor of cultural navigation, especially in the context of a “progressive” and fast-growing American city. Seattle—a city of professional global transplants and historically displaced peoples—reverberates as a site of translation, mimicry, intersection, and “crossing over” between peoples and living history. Appropriately, the exhibition is titled after the Whulshootseed Salish place-name for Seattle.

Often these irreducible borders intersect. How does one live in between these untranslatable cultural borders? How does one speak, standing just outside a crossing over place? This labor of negotiation invites and implicates.

We abandon the idea of fixed being …. The history of a transplanted population,
but one which elsewhere becomes another people, allows us to
resist generalization and the limitations it imposes.
—Édouard Glissant