Room Series nr 3

is an artistic exploration that intimately investigates the impact and experience of displacement as an immigrant. The series emphasizes the role of the body as medium ─ 
 of this process,

           the home away from home,

                  the landscape that compels and reveals the process of dis-placement,

                        moving through different realities and trying to reconstruct the self in a new context.

                             What can we take with us?

                                    how do we take in the new reality?

Kueka

In 2004, I stayed in the Indigenous community of the Pemón in La Gran Sabana, Venezuela. The cacique, or the head of the community, informed me that the German artist Wolfgang Kraker von Schwarzenfeld stole the holy stone of the Pemón called Kueka while traveling to Venezuela in 1998 for his work, “the Global Stone Project ''.  The Kueka as other stolen stones from around the world were displayed in the Berlin Tiergarten where they were vandalized and painted over with graffiti.

Kueka represents the Great Mother to the Pemón people. The theft of the Kueka left the community in a deep grief and ecological disaster. Without the Kueka stone, the rivers dried and altered the environment. This changed the course of the river and the Pemón could no longer fish in certain areas of the river which destroyed the main source of livelihood for the community. This is a part of centuries of colonialist violence faced by the community over generations.

The Kueka was not returned to the Pemon in Venezuela until 2020 after an over two decade fight by the Pemón for reparation and justice.

Western Union

is a project that addresses the reality of some immigrants who, once outside their country of origin, become responsible for earning the main financial income for their families. In Western Union I build a common ground between my own experience as an immigrant and those of other immigrants, using artistic funds as a means of redistributing wealth as a way of twisting the intricate ways in which our society functions. The project has been created on a collective basis in which the subjects have been able to decide how they want to be photographed and were paid for their contribution to the project. In my artistic approach I have deliberately decided to enlarge the photographs directly on canvas, using a light sensitive emulsion to avoid the hyperrealism of documentary photography thus addressing photography and storytelling.

Kültur Gemma Grantee 2019

Memoria de la Tierra

A tribute to the lives of the people of my home country, Venezuela, a country that despite suffering decades of violence and one of the biggest economic crises in the world continues to show a parallel world of courage and beauty.

Memory of the Earth is a photographic documentary series that immortalizes the life of José Luis, a kidnapping survivor in Venezuela and former truck driver who decided to return to his ancestral rural farm in El Morro. In this remote part of the Venezuelan Andes, José Luis' family have guarded the land for generations, preserving an ecosystem with a rich diversity of native flora and fauna including cacti and cujis.

For many years the arid mountains of El Morro has been a hotspot to raise Goats. It was declared a breeding area where the goats graze freely, feeding off the vegetation that grows there naturally. After being kidnapped and released, José Luis decided to return to his farm and raise goats, earning a living by selling milk and cheese.

This project captures the human capacity for perseverance and care in the midst of crisis. The life of José Luis' is a reflection of many Venezuelans living in rural areas where access to basic services is limited, but who have managed to develop self-sustaining strategies that allow them to get by on a day-to-day basis.

"I don't want to leave my land and my animals, I love this land very much". José Luis-

The shadow of the sun

The accelerating ecological damage has shown us in recent decades that everything on our planet is interconnected, when we put gas in our cars it connects us to the Middle East, our phones connect us to the cobalt mines of the Congo, the servers where our metadata is stored are growing at an exponential rate, consuming huge amounts of non-renewable resources such as water while entire populations in the World have no supply of this essential resource.

This ongoing series is my personal investigation into the connection we, as humans, share with the planet. Motivated by my growing concern for our climate future, I recreate intimate scenarios that evoke that connection.

A memory I leave

Nezahualcóyotl

How should I go?
Shall I leave nothing after me on Earth? How should my heart act?
Do we come to live in vain,
to sprout on the Earth?
Let’s at least leave flowers
Let’s at least leave songs


Nezahualcóyotl (in Nahuatl: Nezahualcoyotl “fasting coyote”; 1402-1472) was a warrior, poet and lord of the city of Tetzcoco (Mexico).

Un recuerdo que dejo

Nezahualcóyotl