I Left Too Soon

I Left Too Soon is a project that began with a feeling of emptiness and disconnection caused by time and distance.I emigrated to the United States in 2003, when I was nineteen years old. Unaware of my need to understand the history of my family and somehow get closer to them, my trips between Miami and Peru since 2020 gave birth to this reconnection attempt.

I use family archives, documents, threads, and personal photographs to deconstruct and reconstruct my identity, portray my immigrant experience, and understand the invisible process of uprooting in the United States, as the only one in my family who left home.

With my project, I try to reflect on how distance and absence have affected the bonds and the relationship with my family and the place I was born. Why did I leave? Why did they stay? What were their dreams? How can I find myself in them? How do we heal with so much distance?

I am interested in examining absence, identity, immigration, and the passing of time, reimagining moments and places that I have taken for granted. In these reconnections, I explore a sense of belonging through memories and nostalgia.

Trying to understand why I left.

Each part of the process to complete this project shows me that the initial feeling of emptiness is not resolved by the archives or the information collected; instead, it allows me to produce a work that reflects that unresolved sensation.