Assembling an Album

The installation piece Assembling an Album presents a dissection or assembly table where I address the present by establishing a new relationship with my place of origin, Venezuela, and with the feeling of a lost home, in contrast to the sense of foreignness and alienation.

I conceive the table or platform as a feminine space that suggests a intimate relationship with the domestic. Here, objects are arranged temporarily and can be modified, corrected, or reimagined, proposing fleeting relationships and multiple meanings. There is a desire to reconfigure memory and a sense of resistance that rejects the definitive, the total.

I immerse myself in revisiting my family album, photographic archives, and pictorial books by classical artists to subvert their contents as a strategy of resistance against dominant discourses of patriarchal control. Linking this seemingly unrelated material allows me to reinterpret the world: connecting disparate fragments in new ways, creating intimate and secret relationships. I construct a cartography of habits, metaphors, illness, and dysfunctional narratives through collage. My work materializes as staging of autoethnographic or epiphanic dramas that mirror the systemic oppression of women. I attempt to represent life poetically, meditating on how we have lived in the past and transforming our dynamics and ways of life.

Flowers play a crucial role as a thread connecting emotions and moods. Historically, they have been attributed symbolic meanings related to silence, vulnerability, and secrets… but beyond that, flowers also eloquently represent life and the passage of time.

* This Installation piece is part of the creative process of The Album of Talking Flowers