It has been three weeks since my arrival and I want to share a brief update on my work. As I told you in my first post, this is the beginning of long-term project, that I would like to continue within my own and other countries, in order to have a wide view of the migration process and its meanings. Because of that, in the previous weeks, I have been working on finding aesthetics and approaches to the act of moving, settlement and cultural appropriation.
When talking about my project to connect with people and organizations, their first impression is that I am trying to find people from abroad. That is probably because in the United States I can only get closer to people who finish their migration path, not those who are looking to depart or trying to find new ways to their final destination. It is a partial misconception about what I am looking for because that way of understanding the subject matter will reduce my creative relationship and will only produce pictures with one meaning –i.e. a migrant worker. I would like to make work that allows me to make a creative interpretation of the topic.
As a migrant myself and because of the actual political climate in the United States, I am looking to show photographically the feelings that rule the experience. Fear, anxiety, lost, segregation, displacement, disconnection, et cetera. Working with this premises would probably take me away from the common places in the genre. But is a path that, as migration itself, does not have clear ways. It is an experience constituted by uneven rhythms, loops, waitings and moments of acceleration.
It is a new way of working for me and my practices, too. I’m feeling like challenging my own norms: I am not only using my usual 4×5 and 6×7 color film cameras, but trying with 35mm and 120 roll films in black and white. In the terms of moving, I feel myself traveling without a clear path and a predetermined end. in terms of anthropology, I am just trying to live the experience.
Want to know more and see the printed pictures? Join me for my artist talk and exhibition on June 9th, at 4PM.