My Aunt Marge, 2016
On January 16, 1951, I lost someone I never knew about. The reason was that my family never spoke of her. Her name was Marguerite Martinez, and she was my Father’s Aunt. She was twenty-one years old and in the prime of her life when she died.
Sixty-five years later, why am I speaking about my Aunt Marguerite? It started when my Father and I drove over the 6th Street Bridge in Downtown L.A. I told him the city was planning to destroy the bridge because it was rotting and replacing it with a newer version. He responded with the story about my Aunt Marge, as my Father called her, and how she died on this bridge in 1951.
I was in total shock because I never imagined having any connection to a tragedy like this. My Father continued about how the family was so devastated by the tragic event no one mentioned her until now. A Los Angeles Times article described how my Aunt Marguerite was killed:
“when she was hurled through the windshield of an automobile, over the edge of a bridge parapet…, her body struck a concrete roadway 50 feet below the 6th Street bridge…”-Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1951, pg. 28.
After reading that article and the conversation with my Father, I was overwhelmed by an uncanny connection to the bridge. As I walked on it, I felt its suffering, its sense of longing. I knew I should create something to help my family remember my Aunt and pay respects to a historical landmark.
In February 2016, the 6th Street Bridge will start demolishing, and the city will lose a part of itself. But mostly importantly, my family will lose the last place our Aunt was still alive. I thought, what if I help my Aunt’s spirit to move on from the bridge through a public performance I would become a modern-day ghost of my Aunt, haunting the bridge, evoking her spirit, and helping her to ascend to the other side.
In this performance, I will walk, starting from the bridge parapet, placing twenty-one white roses on the ground until I end up at the start of the bridge. But before the journey ends, I will light a white candle and pay my respects.
All images are 13 x 19 in., Archival pigment prints.
