I Forbid You to Forget Me

I Forbid You to Forget Me is an ongoing series born from the death of my mother. Using my family archive as material and subject, I transform images into objects to examine grief. To hold grief in my hands.

I Forbid You to Forget Me is an ongoing photographic and collage-based project. 

After my mother died, I began sifting through her belongings. I found a photograph of her that I had never seen before. Beneath her portrait, she had written, “Te prohibo que me olvides,” which translates to “I forbid you to forget me.” I wasn’t raised with religion, but I was raised to never disobey my mother. 

The project investigates two contradictory urges: the archival urge to reflect upon the past and the conceptualist urge to bend the process of reflection toward the practice of contemplating. All of the material used in the series comes from my family archive and is presented in a variety of methods, embroidering my mother’s words directly onto photographs, pairing portraits of my mother with her objects, and freezing images in ice. These gestures distort the very materials meant to preserve memory. 

Each image-object becomes fragile through intervention: punctured, reassembled, melted. The work transforms grief into something tactile, temporary, and constantly shifting.