Mommy

After her mother’s death, a daughter questions their ambivalent relationship, her complex desire for a child and the way she constructed herself as a woman.

My mother passed away in 2009, she was in Mexico City and I was finishing my master's degree in Paris. At that moment, I realized that several questions remained unanswered and that it would be hard to grieve from a distance.

This is what made me want to go back to Mexico and spend a few years in my parents' former home, the place where I grew up. I wanted to look into my mother's past, to better understand her life and the woman she was before becoming my mother, but also to better understand our common history and the ambivalence of our relationship.

As the work progressed (2010-2021), I realized that what started out as an intimate story, gradually raised more universal questions related to the process of individuation, of grief, but also to what it is to actually grow as a woman or "to become woman" in our society today, with the various pressures (family, professional, biological, ...) which one undergoes from the moment when we can have children.

Photography, which accompanied me very closely during this process of mourning and personal research, has allowed me over the years to transform this painful chapter into something positive, turned towards life and the future.