On the Road Away from the Venezuelan Roots

When being away from home and close family feelings overflow, Freisy González explores the instability that develops inside of us when we no longer feel sheltered by a sense of belonging.

A migration like ours, like that of us Venezuelans, is not planned, it is rather an uprooting. When you migrate you don’t know when are you going to return, you start to understand that everything mutates, everything is finite, everything shakes.

Feelings of suddenly leaving your country and facing a completely unknown one conform the phenomenon of uprooting, on this ongoing project, I approach them impulsively.

A sensation of chaos, the passage of time, instability, latent memory, the opening towards the penetration of a new landscape on the retina towards the new destination, although it remains uncertain and aimless.

Schizophrenic identity, wandering bodies that smell of rootlessness. We come from the land of sorrow. We are trees with cut branches. The city forces us to work and meanwhile we sigh. Trembling animal wandering, trying to grasp the world. Unstable and fragile, we surrender, I surrender; To uncertainty, to loneliness, to desire, to sadness, to memory, to oblivion, to the open night, to nothingness.

Words and Pictures by Freisy González

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Freisy González Portales (Venezuelan) is a photographer, anthropologist, and musician. Interested in archives and research projects on anthropology and history. Her works are mainly focused on identity and memory, migration, and gender, and have been part of exhibitions in Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, and the United States. Follow her on Instagram and PhMuseum.

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This feature is part of Story of the Week, a selection of relevant projects from our community handpicked by the PhMuseum curators.