measures of the distance

"measures of the distance" [medidas de la distancia] is part of my project "cartography of memory" [cartografía de la memoria], a photographic and poetic exploration of memory, territory, and experience, conceived as a re-writing and invention of my own family history from autopoiesis (autobiography auto-theory self-fiction) as an archive in process, family album in migration, vital rhizome: multiple pieces of different dimensions and densities, heterogeneous and in connection through the assigning rupture of the projected emotion, repeated but different in another place (never determined).

At this stage, measures of the distance focuses on an emotional mapping of the relationships between my broken and connected homes in three cities: my grandmother's house, where I lived until two years ago in my hometown Caracas, Venezuela; my sister's house in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the house I now live in with my husband in Riverside, California, USA

My sister was born when I was three years old and with her, my future memory was illuminated:

The garden inside and the one outside.

The water and the shadows that contain us.

When my sister migrated, I moved too

without changing house,

and I traced the absences

with a quiet voice from the windows.

Five years later my outward migration began, and the geographical distance increased but we wove new instant memories.

In the end and at the beginning, the distance measure is 5 letters: your name.

And the maps that I reinvent to tie our bodies back to the same fire.