Julia Orquera Bianco: Memory, Place & Belonging

Common Good Podcast

The next Abundant Community conversation is on October 26 with Parker Palmer, Peter Block and Sushama Austin-Connor. You can register here.
You can order Julia's new book, Habitats, here.
The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and structures of belonging. For this episode, I speak with multidisciplinary artist and teacher Julia Orquera Bianco.
Julia Orquera Bianco was born in Argentina and lived in Mexico before moving to the United States. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Drawing and Painting from Universidad del Museo Social Argentino (Buenos Aires, Argentina) in 2012. In 2018 she graduated from the MFA program at Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. In 2020, Bianco earned a Certificate on Sustainability from University of California, Los Angeles.​ Bianco works through interrogating constructs resulting from Modern Western Culture, collective memory, and the experience of migration and gender. This allows her to speak about an identity constantly being renegotiated and in motion, in deep relation and conversation with the environment. Her explorations use her family legacy of labor as a strategy to connect with worlds that she is foreign to, experiencing them while remembering. She currently teaches at University of Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work has been showcased in Argentina, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United States.

The recited poem was Shared Breath from Julia's new book, Habitats. Order it here.
I came out wandering, asking the trees and the singing birds for words to help me understand what it means to be present with others.
Water fell from the gray sky in drops,
sometimes thick and abundant,
sometimes slim and sharp,
sometimes tiny and gentle.
Birds sang next to each other,
asking and answering to their correspondence and inquiries as a whole.
All different songs,
overall a complex melody that I fail to understand,
but that for me blends into a harmony of mystery that hides the clues to my predicament.
We feel alone in a world full of others.
Our souls touch even when our hands and feet remain distant.
The forest is like a family where everyone is essential in its own uniqueness and individuality.
There is nothing I have to do except to embrace this generosity.
One thing I can offer is the presence of a shared breath for me to extend myself for others to expand for us to grow together.

This episode was produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change - Eliminating Personal Economic Isolation.