The Body as Monument: Rewriting Black Memory through Art. A conversation with Marisa Williamson

El cuerpo como monumento: Reescribiendo la memoria afroamericana a traves del arte.

In the sixth episode of La Propia Network, we speak with Marisa Williamson, a project-based artist based in Charlottesville, Virginia, whose work unfolds across performance, video, installation, and digital platforms. Marisa’s practice explores the intersections of history, race, feminism, and technology—mapping the past onto present-day landscapes to ask: Whose stories are remembered? Whose are erased?

Through works like Monument to Escape, Sweet Chariot, and Unsettling Grounds, as well as Anatomic Theatre, Marisa reimagines monuments as living spaces of resistance, storytelling, and embodied memory. Rooted in deep archival research and collective participation, her pieces challenge how history is constructed and who is allowed to narrate it.

In this episode, we discuss:

✨ Sally Hemings as a complex historical and emotional figure

✨ The body as a site of performance, archive, and monument

✨ Technology as both a tool of power and a medium for liberatory imagination

✨ The role of collaboration and community in art-making

✨ Black feminist approaches to memory, care, and resistance

We also explore how performance allows memory to move through bodies, how art can unsettle dominant narratives, and how imagination can become an act of survival and reclamation.

Join us as we enter Marisa’s creative world—one where inheritance, labor, grief, joy, and radical love work together to rewrite the archive from the inside out.

🎧 Listen on Spotify, YouTube, or www.lapropianetwork.wix.com

En este episodio, el cuerpo se vuelve archivo y monumento. Marisa nos invita a habitar la historia desde la carne, a desenterrar memorias negras silenciadas, y a imaginar futuros posibles desde la colaboración, la tecnología y la comunidad. Un capítulo sobre cómo el arte puede abrir grietas en los relatos oficiales y transformarlos desde adentro.