Dead Family

Intervening the past to regain control of our history. Resignifying LGBTIQ+ archives build a more diverse memory for the future. Dead Family is a photographic intervention, but also a political one.

I grew up in a family surrounded by women and lonely maternities. I grew up watching the absence of fatherhood. Men were less than women, but they decided and invoked blind strength. At 12, I began to recognize my diversity. At 18, I experienced my first bereavement: my cousin Jose committed suicide. My relatives said that Joseito was homosexual and that is why he decided to take his own life. Corrective violence and binary violence often do not allow the diverse to inhabit the world. In 2013 my mother died and this marked a separation with my family. I moved away from that home that was both a refuge and a concentration camp. In 2022 I began to revisit the family archive, I understood that I was not in it.

I could also say that this person, who is apparently me, was an imposed representation. I began to visit other family archives of LGBTIQ+ people and my questions became certainty. My story, Aurora's, Osiris', Agnes' and Erick's, have something in common. The early years of our personal memories do not represent who we are. Every diverse gesture was censored. Most of us childhoods, trans, non-binary, queer and sex-diverse, must raise ourselves alone, rethink the idea of home, build a chosen family and fight for our rights.

Dead family is a research that looks at the family archive as a binary historical document that protects heteronormative narratives imposed by patriarchal structures. These impositions imply a sexist order that separates the masculine from the feminine and marginalizes identities that are outside of this political-biological mechanism. Diverse identities have no visibility in the action of the "family portrait".

Dead family is a work that intervenes the family archive. It is a photographic intervention, but also a political one. It is a naturally collective project that needs the voice and the eyes of our community. This collaborative nature allows each collaborator who opens the pages of his or her album for us to look at it together, to also intervene their own archives based on the premise: What would a more diverse visual memory look like for the future? 

Five years after being far from my country, from my family and from everything that generated deep wounds in me, I was able to meet again with the only living relative from my mother's house: my sister. We talked about grief, abuse and motherhood. We are both diverse people who, in spite of going through many difficulties, look at the world with justice and love.

All these pains have driven me for 12 years to stand up for my rights and to be a support for other diverse people.