Today we’d like to introduce you to Bruna Mori.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Bruna. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My work has been described as visual ethnography. The books hinge on poetics of the everyday through drifts of cities, suburbs, and of commodities. ‘Dérive’ (Meritage Press) is based on riding subways to the end of each line in New York, ‘BEIGE’ (Upset Press) documents long walks through San Diego and Gardena, and ‘Poetry for Corporations’ (Insert Blanc Press) republishes my copywriting as poetry. Visual artists and design collaborators include Matthew Kinney, George Porcari, Kylie King, Peter Matthews, Wendy Belt, and Jessica D’Elena-Tweed.
Spatial discourses and making spaces for others to tell their stories are my interests, as are shifting subjectivities within and through places, disappeared histories, and lately, the source of things and systems (including infrastructure). Writer Georges Perec, favorite cataloguer of daily life, wrote in ‘Species of Spaces:’ “Question your teaspoons,” or investigate their origins and consequences. Closer to home, my mom and uncle, both painters, urged me as a kid to look at landscapes—a gesture of sky, a cut of architecture, time’s passage, its mark. That contributed to my preoccupations—not so much romantic travelogues, but street views and re/mapping of paths.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
For a time, my poetics became a more literal and unintended ethnography of access to care and research. 2008 welcomed the birth of my son Lucien, but it also brought the deteriorating health of my parents. As an only daughter, I was caregiving, looking into care facilities, navigating the healthcare system, watching my kid grow into the world as my parents passed on—a spread of six years.
That incited me to write for the nonprofit sector, working on healthcare advocacy with a design and film production firm called Wondros Global—connecting arts with health to enhance patient communication and promote the work of vital networks. At The San Diego Foundation, I additionally co-curated a public engagement series to pose solutions to pressing regional health challenges, from healthcare to recidivism and poverty. We welcomed social justice leaders and social entrepreneurs like Ai-Jen Poo, Manuel Pastor, Scott Budnick, Dolores Huerta, and the late Leila Janah to name a few how struggle becomes strategy.
We’d love to hear more about your work.
I’m known as a lecturer at schools like UC San Diego and Woodbury School of Architecture locally, and a writer for foundations, arts institutions, and design labs devoted to sustainable futures. I’m also the author of articles, essays, and three books.
The most recent is ‘BEIGE’ with George Porcari, featuring a long brisk walk through the San Diego and Gardena suburbs. In Torrey Hills, where I currently live, the order is remarkable; developments were built post-2000, and the convenience is ridiculously consistent. Aspirations might look a little 1950s, but kid-run snow cone stands considered accepting bitcoin for a while. My main interest, however, was in the older suburb Lemon Grove, where I first landed in California as a teenager. It was a dilemma to write about a place known intimately, so I attempted to take on the role of a Perec figure, fastidiously recording observations in lists.
Rather than writing from a familiar café, I sat outside a Baskin Robbins, where I worked in high school. I mounted a borrowed camera and blurred the frame so there would be no accountability in the visit. Yet memory interrupted, and I penned a contemporary spatial discourse: a fragmented narrative autobiography interspersed with the formal history of a place—trying to account for it after all.
Pricing:
- BEIGE: $25 – uapress.com/product/beige/ (also on Amazon)
- Poetry for Corporations: $32 – insertblancpress.net/products/poetry-for-corporations-by-bruna-mori (also on Amazon)
- Dérive: $11.92 – amazon.com/Derive-Bruna-Mori/dp/0970917961
Contact Info:
- Website: brunamori-blog.tumblr.com/
- Email: brunamori@gmail.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/sunlightofeachwindow/
- Facebook: facebook.com/brunamori
- Other: linkedin.com/in/brunamori/
Image Credit:
George Porcari
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