Instinto/insecto

A photobook exploring childhood bullying through family archives, digital interventions, drawings, and personal notes. Texture and visceral imagery materialize emotional roughness while creating a hybrid language for processing trauma.

Instinct Insect

There are experiences that remain suspended in memory, resisting both forgetting and expression. "Instinct Insect" is a photographic project in photobook format that emerges from the need to address memories from a period of my childhood marked by school bullying, whose emotional effects continue to manifest in my adult life. For years, these experiences remained as silenced territory, without finding channels for processing or communication.

The project began with reviewing my family archive: photographs from my childhood that contrasted with the painful memories associated with that same period. I also incorporated material from my personal digital archive, establishing a dialogue between the documented child's gaze and my current perspective. The images that spoke to me were characterized by showing empty spaces and fragments obtained through cropping specific details. During this process of visual exploration, scattered notes with words, phrases, and emotions began to emerge organically.

Texture emerged as a fundamental element for transmitting the emotional roughness associated with these memories. Through digital interventions I sought to materialize aspects of the experience that were difficult to communicate solely through verbal language. Drawing revealed itself as a key tool, offering a channel to address the violent aspects of the experience without resorting to literal representations. These drawings function as emotional maps that connect with specific episodes from my childhood. The strokes and visceral use of color evidence an emotional intensity that had remained unexpressed for years.

Through this process I understood that the project directly addressed the bullying I experienced during my childhood, but also the persistence of its effects on my current identity construction. The photobook format allowed me to integrate these diverse materials and develop a coherent narrative, while also experimenting with specific rhythms between images, creating an immersive experience that transcends mere observation.

The title "Instinct/Insect" arises from my reflection on the behavioral transformations I experienced during that stage, exploring the intersection between the human and the instinctive that can emerge in contexts of extreme emotional vulnerability. This photobook constitutes an attempt to confront and examine a traumatic episode from my childhood with the objective of processing the emotions associated with that past while establishing an active dialogue between who I was then and who I am in the present.