Music is Erin’s offering. 11 years ago she used it as a passageway to achieve her goal of living in Spain.
With the supportive cushion of the Berklee College of Music network, Erin, a native of Chicago, made her way through Madrid, Valencia and now Barcelona; finding community with like minded musicians and building a strong professional career for herself.
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Erin is no novice in her professional worlds. She is a skilled interdisciplinary artist and certified Identity & Belonging coach with many years of experience. Erin can tell you what it means to search for value and community in the different music circles of Spain; how merely showing up won’t guarantee you admittance into those circles. Your own trial and error is required, along with a combination of patience, stick-to-itiveness and courage.
Courage is an important factor here. Not everyone can move to a new country, far from their mother tongue and native teachings ready to re-commit themselves to their goals, year after year. Now after eleven years in Spain, Erin has cultivated a vibrant personal and professional life for herself in Spain. She can also switch in conversation from English to Spanish to Catalan and back again, seemingly effortlessly. Erin’s courage has paid off and she attributes some of this gumption to her ever unfolding understanding of neurodivergence. “The more that I’ve learned about neurodivergence and ways in which not having the formal diagnosis as a child may have limited me, I have to think about ways in which it also probably gave me wings. Some unidentified facet of my own neurodivergence is complete lack of spatial awareness in realms of fear”.
Another hurdle that comes with trying to “make it” as an artist in a foreign country is the challenge of finding a space to live authentically within your own culture and art disciplines; all the while hoping when new communities come to translate your work, it won’t become caricature.
People other than the original artist will always put art work through their own lens to try and connect. So, learning how to authentically show up and participate in each community seems to be a skill that one must cultivate. Erin says there is a scene for everyone if you do some digging (specific to Madrid). And perhaps if you can’t find it, then you make your own.
Everyone doesn’t find their way eventually. Erin explains, “The majority of, specifically black Americans, come to Spain and shrink into their own shell and people just don’t know who they are for awhile. They just stop speaking up about this or that…so you just withdraw and then people wanna put definitions on why you withdraw”.
When I first met Erin after her performance at the Jamboree music club in Barcelona, I could tell she was in her element (well, one of them). Her stunning voice and flute playing was easily the most captivating part of that night’s musical performance. I couldn’t have been the only audience member who felt this way.
Erin’s commitment to living with authenticity is inspiring and surely, the communities she contributes to are much better for it.
Erin recently launched For We: A Multidisciplinary Memoir Project. “The project documents a Black woman’s journey from growing up between the South Side and the surrounding suburbs of Chicago, to a fateful move abroad to Spain to discover her calling as a storyteller and community-builder through music, language and writing.” The project is currently holding a fundraiser on Go Fund Me at https://www.gofundme.com/f/for-we-project.
You can follow Erin’s instagram pages for updates: @erincorinedoesthings & @holamagnolia.identityworks
Earlier this year I sat down with Erin to discuss her work. You can view the conversation below.
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