Las cosas vuelven a su sitio por la noche y otros cuentos

A photographic exploration of home after trauma and silence. Returning to my childhood space, I examine memory, concealment, and the body, approaching the domestic realm with a forensic gaze to uncover what persists beneath everyday surfaces.

Home, in its earliest stages, represents a total place. Beyond its boundaries, things happen that lie outside our understanding, distant and unknowable. Within it, we experience protection, always part of its interpersonal and spatial dynamics, inhabiting and embodying it.

When a traumatic event takes place within its walls, its spaces and surfaces become covered by a veil, by a persistent mist. At times they serve as reminders of what occurred; at others, as places that conceal secrets, watching attentively and in silence.

When, in addition, the family environment hides what happened and silences it, the home changes its nature. It ceases to be a space of care and safety and becomes a totemic reminder of what was affected — a territory rendered nebulous by silence. This project seeks to approach that reality — more frequent than is admitted in contexts such as Lima, my hometown — and the structural consequences that these practices of concealment produce in the body, memory, and domestic space.

Night is the threshold from which I explore my history. From trauma transformed into nightmare, I return to the space I have inhabited my entire life in order to question it, traverse it, and, to some extent, re-signify it. The exploration of my memory is a blind approach to a fragmented surface, where absences and omissions condition any attempt at narration. The home, the city that surrounds it, its elements and crevices reveal shards and scars.

I can say that something broke in my childhood as a result of violation and silence. Today I return to look at home — not as a refuge, but with a forensic impulse, in order to confront what was concealed. Photography thus becomes an act of persistence. A way of unveiling what was relegated to the shadows. Through these images, concepts such as home, memory, the body, and trauma intersect as fields in which what has disappeared and what persists coexist, and where traces of the everyday silently reveal what was hidden.

© Sergio Iván Meléndez Cava - An archival photograph altered by my parents — an attempt to cut out what happened and silence it.
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An archival photograph altered by my parents — an attempt to cut out what happened and silence it.

© Sergio Iván Meléndez Cava - A photograph taken in the bunk bed where the events of my childhood unfolded.
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A photograph taken in the bunk bed where the events of my childhood unfolded.

© Sergio Iván Meléndez Cava - Image from the Las cosas vuelven a su sitio por la noche y otros cuentos photography project
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A mural composed of family portraits taken over the years, each bearing the same cut once made by my parents to remove the abuser from our photographs. By repeating their gesture — meant to hide him and silence the story — I reveal what their attempt to erase could not contain.

© Sergio Iván Meléndez Cava - Me at seven, after the abuse had ended.
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Me at seven, after the abuse had ended.

© Sergio Iván Meléndez Cava - Image from the Las cosas vuelven a su sitio por la noche y otros cuentos photography project
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My body, ‘wounded by light.’ In this project, light represents truth — piercing and harsh in its clarity. At the same time, it mirrors the landscape of the place I inhabit.

© Sergio Iván Meléndez Cava - My hands hold the truth — something I’ve been doing ever since I stopped trying to silence my own story.
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My hands hold the truth — something I’ve been doing ever since I stopped trying to silence my own story.