Mapas Identitarios

The current project stems from all the questions that generated an approximation to all my family photograph archive, event that led me to reflect about the personal transformation that the migration from countryside to the city my family embraced. Some of the questions that stemmed from this event was: which is the role that I have in my family? being the last male grandson in a big family, which is the role I have on my familiar cohort? in which way migration reconfigured my identity?

In order to know the origins of this visual proposal, it is advisable to return until I was nine years old. My family decided to move from the countryside to the city. The first migration was from Cuyunday, a little village in the province of Otuzco, to Otuzco proper. Afterwards, there was another migration (in the beginning of the 90s) towards the city of Lima. Despite having several relatives willing to give me a home in the big city; the absence of a paternal figure led me to have negative emotional effects. Therefore, my family proposed me to come to Lima - but this new displacement implied a change from quietness to the hectic city life and, in the end, caused a family halt. Nonetheless, all those migratory movements were aimed to look for a better future.

Once in Lima there was a turning point, when I figured out that the concept of family as a common core of union, support and so forth (attributes that, according to society, are linked), were only superficial. The facts that there were secrets and that not everything was according to that I saw caused a division that made me subtly separate from my family. In the following years I got support from blocking mechanisms to avoid those sensations, but there was a point when I decided to face this situation and identify this emptiness.

All these events entail the focal point of this project: to show the identity change made by the migratory movement, through the appropiation of the family stock photos. Whenever a human being moves from one point to another there is a change, no matter how small it seems in the beginning, and it has an effect in the identity of the migrant.

The archive used are property of one of my aunts, Violeta Rodríguez, who discovered amateur photography at a very early age, whilst studying in Lima. Since she was thousands of kilometers away from home, these images made her to feel safe, protected and in company, while being part of their identity. Even though in the following years she developed her abilities in order to get more stylistic qualities, the main goal of representing the world that surround here did not change.

The role of color in "Mapas Identitarios" is as connector, as a link between the past and the present. There is the aim of creating a place for reuniting and rekindling, while each color's palette has an association that exceeds a simple aesthetic penchant, since it is also evoking events when I was a child. From this position I saw and felt my family as a united group and though that this was going to be permanent, but this changed with the migration. The dream of reconciliation is shown with the use of primary colors such as red, blue, and yellow as main goal, and the use of secondary colors as complements.

As well as the fact that colors are main part of this project, also deliberate brush strokes are paramount - painting with irregular lines bears resemblance with infancy and entails a self-belonging nostalgia. I identified in this practice a desire to traveling back in time to be together with all the people in each photography, thereby not only belonging to a group but also being remembered as part of one.

There are some childish attributes that we can easily perceive, such as the delimitations in clothing and in plain forms, light volume, and shading, which are mainly the utopian search of going back in time through photographic language - a feeling that is paramount throughout all this project.

In order to intervene the superimposed pictures, I had to rely on my memory to identify the people I recognize as family or that, at least, I associate with. Incidentally, since this exercise led me to redefine my definition of family, in the case of people that I did not recall I swiftly erased them, with the use of black acrylic paint.

The project results in three visual pieces, ordered in three photographic parts: in the part of the archive, there was a reinterpretation of an archive of more than four decades, testimony of the migration of the Rodríguez Castro family. Regarding the documentary aspect, several current images were used, in order to make temporal contrasts. Finally, regarding the photo montage, this was used to unify all the information layers and connect the current world with the family stock photos, through a childish paint intervention. In other words, there is a recreation of several events of my personal history, in order to replace the absence in part of the familiar life and establish a closure in my formation as an adult.