@fotovillain
@anti.photo
Self-portrait, Stitched Flag, and Ecuadorian Icons, US, 2023
Almohadas, Spain, 2023
Bola at Canchas Union Latina, Spain, 2024
Parking Lot in Ecuavoley Court, Spain, 2023
Agonizing Bird, Spain, 2024
Self-portrait, Vicente Alban Colonial Paintings (1783), Ancestry Test Result (2024), US, 2023
Remnants of Forking Paths (2022-ongoing) gives form to the Ecuadorian migrant experience in New York, the US, and Castilla-La Mancha, Spain, through various visual mediums such as photography, collages, and video works. The project stems from tracing back the Ecuadorian migratory wave to the United States and Spain in the late 1990s and early 2000s during and after the country's economic crash.
My Ecuadorian family's migrant story also serves as the blueprint to delve into poignant themes of labor, domestic and public spaces, assimilation, post-colonial and globalized bodies, and early Latino identity building. Though the project started through constant visits to Ecuadorian cultural hotspots in NYC, it eventually led me to travel back to Spain for the first time in nine years to photograph the community I was once part of as a child. In a way, I attempted to turn my personal memories of migratory displacement into visual remnants of what I once lived and remembered.
Simultaneously, I asked myself how Western forces of assimilation permeate the Ecuadorian collective imagination. In which ways do we rebuild ourselves? How does that look visually? All with the ultimate purpose to, in the words of bell hooks, "use images to connect ourselves with recuperative and redemptive memory that enables us to construct radical identities, images of ourselves that transcend the limits of the colonizing eye."