Fragmentos de la Memoria (2021)

Two channel projection, sound, color, text, duration, loop.

Fragmentos de la Memoria, 2021, is two channel video projection that stages a multiplicity of images and sound, that do not follow simple binary logic, to honor the poetics of historical excavation. As my maternal grandmother tells the story of the event that initiated our migration in 1995, four different frames of memoria from my travels to Cuba in 2016-18 cycle in a non-linear order; driving through el Malecón, my father and grandmother preparing dinner, my father getting my named tattooed on his forearm, and footage of the monthly queer gathering at a local night club in Güines.

This piece not only bends but also juxtaposes a recomposition of memory tracing a traversed trajectory mapping the perimeters of border crossing. I interrogate the past as a strategy of formation of self approaching a queer world; looking at a big horizon for something beyond the margin, the quotidian body and being, permanence, and a portal into kinship and belonging. Memory is not static when constructing worlds, it can be impossible to hold yet offers multiple matrixes where the self is made and remade. Without collapsing under the gravitational pull of nostalgia, this performance of memory anchors itself in place, migrant and marginalized body, name, legacy, and performance.