My Mother Speaks of Land as Memory

My mother speaks of land as memory. Always nostalgic, and never in present tense.

My Mother Speaks of Land as Memory is a project born of loss — of land, of identity, and of the past and future selves held by my father, my mother, and myself. It is grounded in the present yet reaches into the past to reimagine the future through myth: that powerful, repeated, collective affirmation of truth we rely upon in moments of upheaval.

Through photography, film, and installation, I create a living archive of my family’s history — one that bends, weaves, and collapses around the fragmented idea that my parents’ timelines can run parallel to my own, preserved within one of my many containers for memory. For as memory shifts, so too does my archive, adapting with each space it inhabits to create pockets of lives lived, lost, and never realized.

After my father’s death in 2011, I began personifying him within the Texas landscape, our shared home. I had never made images of him while he was alive, and so I began imagining what a portrait of him might look like after death. In searching for him in the arid Texas earth, I found my mother — an immigrant from Puerto Rico — unmoored in this vast foreign desert. Through my father and me, she became embedded in his landscape, losing ties to her own history and grasping at the loose ends of her identity. I juxtapose her terrain with his — water and desert, life and death, myth and memory — weaving together the story of their past and the future that was taken. At the center, I stand as artist, daughter, facilitator, executor — constructing our shared familial identity through present day imagery.

My mother, father, and I exist in three separate timelines, converging through memory, myth, and the desire to reconcile what was, and what could have been. From the fragments of my archive, I build a new history — one in which we all exist together in a single time and place: a home at twilight, when grief and longing are most palpable and the veil between life and death is thinnest, allowing us to reach out and grasp one another in reconciliation.