“Still Playing With Fire”

Works by Marcus Xavier Chormicle

January 2021

"Still Playing With Fire" is a long-term photographic project about Xavier's family and their individual and communal history within Southern New Mexico. Through a pseudo-documentary approach to photographing my family and the land around Las Cruces, NM, I interrogate the generational trauma of my family, and the cycles of violence and suffering that have followed us in the context of dominant narratives of white supremacy in Colonial Spain, Imperial Mexico all the way through the current occupation of the land by the United States of America. Through photography, Xavier navigates the loss of family and culture. Beginning with the death of his paternal grandfather, an enrolled Agua Caliente Cahuilla man was shot by Las Cruces Police officers while in custody in the '70s. Next, to the murder of Xavier's uncle in 2019, and through the recent death of Xavier's cousin who was lost to overdose. Xavier makes this work as a means of tracking, documenting, interpreting, and working through the enormous pain that has lived in his people and family for generations and is passed down with every new birth.