Raíces

After three years of living in New York, I went back to Mexico during the summer of 2023 to visit family. Guanajuato, a small town in Mexico, is the place where my mother grew up, the place that her side of the family still calls home. In between family gatherings and exploring the town, my aunt pointed something out to me that she knew I would enjoy. In one of the corners of her house laid a dusty old suitcase. When I opened this suitcase, stories came flowing out. Faces I knew frequented these frames, though slightly different. And many faces I didn’t know and maybe never will appeared alongside them. Yet what struck me the most was that it brought back to me the faces of those whom time has slowly taken away from my memory. 

He passed away when I was only seven, and I never really got the chance to know about his love for photography until I got to Parsons and chose him for a research project. But this, this was proof. Proof that I had something of him with me, that the traces were still there, that they were enough for me to bring the pieces together, not just of who he was but of my family as a whole; it was just a matter of looking between the layers. 

My grandfather’s archive, mainly composed of photographs and postcards, lived in the forgotten suitcase. An archive acquires this title once the person who collected these pieces of media, documents, and/or objects is no longer present, and in doing so becomes part of a larger historical narrative. This particular archive recorded everything, from his trips as a young man to his daughters growing up. It started in the 1920s, continuing up until 2000, which means I was not to be found among the hundreds of photographs in there. But it was soon after his passing that I got my very first camera, a tiny purple digital camera with which I would document my family from that point forward. A few years later, after his archive ended, the role of the family photographer would pass down to me.   

La Memoria de las Paredes is a series that brings my grandfather’s archival material into dialogue with my photographic work to piece together the fragments of a family’s stories through generations and the walls that form their home. As I documented the walls of the home through my camera, I began questioning their construction and composition. Searching for clues on their persistence over the decades alongside their inevitable decay, the stories and people shaped within this space started to reveal themselves. The stories I discovered honored their past and their representation granted space for new ones to be written in the future. It is a study of the traces left behind, of the duality between love and loss – ultimately, a story about what forms a home. It is a project that was exhibited at the 2024 BFA Photo Thesis Exhibition in April of the same year.

Responses to archival material are no novelty in contemporary art practice, as evident in Okwui Enwezor’s Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art at the International Center of Photography in 2007. In this exhibition, Enwezor included 50 artists working with archival materials, all tied together by themes of “identity, history, memory and loss,”¹ themes speaking to the inherent nature of the archive, a record of a life lived and the space that it leaves behind once lost. Space for dialogue between past, present and future opens up when using the archive in creative practices in a way that allows for artists to re-process the material or create as a response to what has been.

Los Trazos 

Photography is a funny thing. It allows for things to be permanent in a way, but at the same time it is just pigments on paper, pigments that fade and paper that tears. Most of the pictures I found in the archive were in good condition, but there were some others where time has left visible traces on their texture, sepia tonality, and fade. The pigments that endured over time stand as traces of the lives lived and the stories created. The fading of materiality goes hand in hand with the fading of memory. The archive, as Achille Mbembe proposes, has a dual nature as both a temple and a cemetery. A temple, because it comes with certain rituals that commemorate and honor the past, and a cemetery, because what it entails is just “fragments of life and pieces of time, all shadows and footprints inscribed in paper.”²

Despite the portrayal of numerous people across generations, I undertook most of the project on my own, oftentimes working in isolation. After many hours scanning the archive, suddenly I couldn’t miss a single detail of what a photograph had to offer. I noticed a certain beauty that came with the abstract marks of time. Desvanecer explores the notion of time, capturing its fade and embracing its abstraction. When creating this digital collage I sought out the marks that hinted at the beauty in the passage of time, as well as the beauty in the fade. I started by taking the abstractions created by the faded pigments of a photograph from the archive as the background for the collage. The curved pattern slowly began to make its way closer to the photographs of my grandfather, time and fade coming their way. I manipulated the opacity within each of his photographs, mirroring the loss of the body and the fade of memory that accompanies the degradation of materiality. 

Las Paredes 

The title of my work was inspired by the title of a series of works by Mexican artist Oswaldo Ruiz called La memoria de la sustancia³, where he weaves together photographs, video, and sculptural work to question the physicality, history, and social impact of commonly used materials and substances within Mexican culture. Through this work, Ruiz makes the viewers question the stories inherently embedded into objects and materials, as well as the personal stories and interpretations people attach to them. Ruiz proposes that the practice of artmaking may shift or transform the meanings of these objects. 

Guanajuato, located in central Mexico, is a place that has witnessed generations of my family, but also great historical events and an honoring of such. One of the main attractions of this city include the mummies of Guanajuato, a glimpse into the practice of honoring the dead in Mexican culture. Each corner of this town echoes stories from its past, charged with an energy that holds all that has come before it, where people don’t quite seem to leave their loved ones and their homes. My family eventually settled in the house where my mom and her sisters grew up. Years passed and the family expanded. More houses were built in the lots that surrounded that first house. Walls were torn down and walls were brought up. Some people considered this place their first home, some their last.  

As for me, the walls of the house served as the bridge that connected my grandfather’s work to my own. While I flipped through my grandfather’s photo albums over the summer, I took my camera and wandered through the house, capturing these spaces through my own lens.  Los cimientos, as well as the archival material and my photographs, were all edited to be in black and white to create cohesion between them. The chosen aesthetic allowed me to convey the sense of nostalgia and loss embedded into the series, and to compress generational time by bringing past, present, and in a way, future into the same realm. 

Ecos de las Raíces depicts one of the many walls I photographed. This is the wall that separates two of the houses. Having photographed this space for years, this time I took a different approach. The walls became not just a background for family pictures, but gained life as I came closer and photographed all its marks formed by the gaps left by the fallen pieces. The choice to bring walls to life through photography was inspired by Pablo Lopez Luz’s work in Piedra Volcanica, which Álvaro Enrigue described as an index of Mexico City’s skin. Enrigue states that skin is our most obvious organ yet so mysterious: “it’s a liminal fortress, our concrete connection to the world, the moving map that defines a self, the codex in which whatever beauty we may have interacts with marks of past pains.”⁴ I realized that what I had been photographing was my own index of my family’s skin.

Dannielle Bowman’s work in What Had Happened served as inspiration as I set out to document the spaces that family sets down roots in, in a black and white series of photographs that explores the spaces as well as the people taking them up.⁵ It was important for me to convey the duality of the walls of a home, as they can embody love and support but can also close us off, and tear us down. Guanajuato is a small town that can amplify some of the restrictiveness already embedded in Mexican culture. In Sin título, some aspects of this restrictive and conservative nature appear, especially in the form of religion. The figure of the cross in this photograph is repeated several times within the frame as an object, as light, and as shadows. It is as inescapable as religion is in this town. In Guanajuato, located in the El Bajio region, most of the inhabitants practice Catholicism, and a large number of cathedrals and churches are seen all over town. These sacred spaces have endured for centuries, and with them religious ideals, many of which are conservative in nature. 

Meanwhile, in Capas, a physical collage that features my grandmother at different stages of her life set against the same walls of the home, we glimpse a story that would be typically lost due to the constraints of the patriarchal system, a system which has yet to be dismantled. Women are usually endowed with the task of keeping the home and everyday life going. Yet when it comes to the stories that we tell, theirs are usually the last ones to be heard or seen. These ideas brought me back to Charlotte Perkins’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in which the narrator sees women hidden behind the layers of wallpaper pattern in the walls of the house.⁶ I found that referencing the different layers that form my family’s home could serve as a way of peeling them off, similar to the Perkin’s story, especially since most of the stories I found in my grandfather’s archive and my own are about whom he called his Mujercitas (Little Women). 

La Caída 

Working with the archive allows me to understand the present by looking at the past in order to create changes in the future, similarly to the lens of Aaron Turner’s work. In Black Alchemy: Resolve (attempt #1), Turner takes his family archive and rephotographs it alongside reflective materials, creating a dialogue that acknowledges the passage of time while questioning identity.⁷ As I’ve grown older, I have realized the importance of memory and passing down stories, and the need for space for new stories to be written about. When I became an aunt, these feelings grew as well as a desire for this new generation to not be defined and restrained by the walls that had limited generations before them. 

Portrayed in Ines is my niece. I have had a camera on hand at all times since the moment she was born, and she grew up very used to me taking pictures of her to a point where the camera doesn’t alter her reaction. Shooting with a prime 50mm lens meant I had to be very physically close to her, yet our trust in each other allowed for the moment to flow without the camera shifting the mood. I hope she is able to experience the love that I have seen within the walls and understand that love and loss often coexist. When seeing this series I would hope to inspire not only her but also viewers to recognize what their walls are built of and not be afraid to peel back the wallpaper every once in a while. There is such beauty in the layers, in the shadows, and in the traces that we must not shy away from. 

La Memoria de las Paredes became a testament to the nonlinearity of time and family histories- an abstract culmination of sorrow, joy, deterioration and beauty, all coexisting simultaneously. This is why for the installation of the work at the 2024 BFA Photo Thesis Exhibition, a group exhibition at Parsons School of Design, I chose for it to be displayed in a non-linear,  abstract, and even messy manner, just as time is. The installation consisted of nineteen photographs woven together, occupying most of the wall space available, making it visually overwhelming and not easily accessible, similar to the nature and process of using archival material. Through layers of blended images both physical and digital collages were created where the distinction of time became blurred. Different opacities are used within the layers with the help of tracing paper in order to push forward the concept of the traces left behind with time that the series explores, as photographs have a visible fleeting quality to them. 

Throughout the creation process of this project, things grew and transformed, some things left, some appeared, and others kept coming back, as if begging to be seen. Recently I have been experimenting with the use of plaster as a way to bring another dimension to the work, inviting the walls into the space to create an immersive experience for the viewers. Even though the project has already been exhibited once, it seems to be far from over, and the comments and reactions to the work only became a testament to the importance of the message.  It may have started out as a means to reconnect with and get to know my grandfather, but it ended up being a conversation about the people whom we both had the privilege to know and to love, and with it came a recognition of the importance of having these conversations in order to move forward. It became about what forms a home.

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^{1. Enwezor, Okwui. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. New York: International Center of Photography, Steidl, 2008. ↩}

^{2. Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and its Limits” in Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid & Razia Saleh, 19-26. The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. ↩}

^{3. Patricia Conde Galería. “La Memoria de la Sustancia. Oswaldo Ruiz.” Accessed March 25, 2024.↩}

^{4. Enrigue, Álvaro. “An Index of Mexico City’s Skin”. Aperture, Fall 2019. ↩}

^{5. Martin, Lesley A. “2020 Portfolio Prize Winner: Dannielle Bowman.” Aperture, April 18, 2020.↩}

^{6. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. London: Virago, 2012. ↩}

^{7. “AARON R. TURNER | BLACK ALCHEMY: RESOLVE (ATTEMPT #1).” n.d. Penumbra Foundation – Photography Non-Profit in NYC. Accessed October 16, 2023. ↩}