This post is part of a dossier that features materials that were generated at, or in the aftermath of, the “Experiments in Listening” conference that boundary 2 co-organized with the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Southern California in January 2025.
Lost Object
Inger Flem Soto
Lost Object is an experimental video work developed in dialogue with my doctoral research on the figure of the mother in Chilean thought and literature. The piece brings together a handmade 16mm film projected over a slideshow drawn from my personal archive of analogue photographs—some taken in the 1990s, others during a difficult month in 2021. An earlier version of the text was first read at the “Experiments in Listening” conference in Los Angeles in January 2025.
Transcription
I look at my hands while making this love letter, and I think of yours. I see them become yours, and I start seeing myself in you. This time with less fear. And I wonder if I’m clinging on to let go.
Surprisingly, I find you not only in me, but also in the most unlikely of spaces: masked behind a fresh shave and the highest of heels. Walking past the working girls during my Saturday night pilgrimage through the heart of Santiago, I hear you, my mother. Their deep voices channel your words, or are they perhaps channeling their own mothers? No po, niña. Cómo se te ocurre, hueona. As they banter and tell each other off, I hear your voice scolding me—your tone a mix of humor and dread.
The hardship of your childhood carved in you a certain knowledge, sharp and tenacious. Nothing gets past you. A mí no me vienes con esa, perrita, que cuando tú vas yo ya vengo de vuelta, ¿o creís que nací ayer? “Do you think I was born yesterday?” you clap back. Because you see it all, you always have—your smothering gaze.
After tripping over the same stone, over and over again, I hear you: Por dios, hasta cuándo. No te digo yo. Si esta otra es dura como palo… ¡no hay caso! You call me out for being hard as a club, stubborn as rust, with the same words your mother called you for the same stubbornness—but with a heavier hand than the one I ever knew.
I search for you in the tongues of the travestis. In the way they talk when, knowingly or not, they may be quoting their own mothers. And, in the wake of these many mother tongues, I even catch a glimpse of my grandmother, whom I never met.
What is it about this singular speech that holds such power of repetition—always somehow echoing The Mother? Something in its bootleg femininity, that fierce artifice, that exposes this chained economy of quotation.
Despite buying into the fantasy of belonging in the kingdom of wealth, you were never able to assimilate. Closer to queendom, your difference also showed, exposing the secret hidden behind your bleached blonde hair. The clickety-clack of your piercing heels, unable to mask the rhythm of the cumbia inscribed in your hips. The imprint of your bruised background, betraying you in the company of the posher, unwelcoming mothers at my school. Your cross-dressed class crossing the other mother’s wires; and their short, stubby nails—so natural, discreet, so vanilla.
But high heels make for unstable steps, however fierce they may have been in my childhood memories.
I wonder if choosing me made you lose yourself.
I fear losing your smothering hands nearly as much as I fear becoming you. My hands reaching out to yours, to some version of you—one that was always already lost.
Before the catastrophe. Before the beginning.
Inger Flem Soto is a researcher, photographer, and translator currently pursuing her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California. Her research examines the maternal as a contested figure across Chilean literature, philosophy, and political discourse, foregrounding its role in structuring meaning through processes of erasure and displacement. Alongside her scholarly writing, film photography and darkroom practice are central modes of inquiry in her work. She is also co-director of Grápho Ediciones, a Chile-based independent publishing house dedicated to critical theory and philosophy.