Within This White House is a performance piece blending spoken word and drawing. An intermittent spoken word performance of a new poem Our House will be accompanied by drawing on the walls of Axle Contemporary. The drawings’ imagery will serve to emphasize the diversity of the United States Congress via the genre of portraiture. The performance piece Within This White House will highlight the phrase repeated at the January 6th insurrection, ‘Whose house? Our house!’; thereby, reinforcing the concept of the Capitol as everyone’s house. The artist’s draws from her own personal history, as a Latina, for memories and symbolism related to ‘our house’. Aligning with the timeline of the January 6th insurrection, the durational performance will be 4 hours and 10 minutes; this is how much time elapsed between Trump’s speech and when the National Guard arrived at the Capitol to secure it.

​

Rosemary Meza-DesPlas was born and raised in Garland, Texas. Her parents’ heritage is rooted south of the US border: Her mother was born in Allende in Coahuila, Mexico. Her father, born in Santa Maria, Texas, grew up in Tampico in Tamaulipas, Mexico. The tenacity of her eight aunts in the face of personal tragedies and adversities was an early inspiration; their narratives contributed to her embrace of feminist ideology. Meza-DesPlas currently lives in Farmington, New Mexico.