This project explores my brother's and my relationship with my mother, which oscillated between twisted love and violence. I generated photographs and texts through my memories, transmuting my perception of my mother as a child once I reached adulthood.
"The first war is sometimes home. The first lost homeland, the family."
"The first war is sometimes home. The first lost homeland, the family."
Alaíde Ventura. Entre los rotos
Ojos que conocieron la misma guerra (Eyes that knew the same war) is a written, performative, and photographic exploration of my family history within a context of violence. This exploration combines written memory, family archive, constructed photography, and the transmutation that my memories underwent once I reached adulthood, and focuses on the notion of home and family as a group of remnants, as well as the persistent quest to collect and abstract the fragments of what was once destroyed to create a new home with them. Through these explorations, I seek to give shape to this puzzle whose pieces have always remained disrupted and in chaos.
Her love was my alert not to move, to hide, to move everything with the utmost care. I learned to coexist with a good and bad mother. Mom who takes care of me. Mom who pulls my puppy's hair out with electrician's tweezers until it bleeds as punishment. Mom who helps me do awesome homework for school. Mom who orders my brother to catch cats that get into the house and electrocute them to death. Mom who bathes me carefully. Mom who punishes me by leaving me in the rain naked. Mom who tucks me in when it's cold. Mom who whips my brother with wires. Mom who hugs me and tells me I'm the most beautiful thing in her life. Mom who burns all our childhood photos. Mom who...
