Regards from the Center of the World

This project follows a group of young Ecuadorian women, whose parents left their homeland to seek shelter and hope for a better life abroad. Their gaze turns towards repair, celebrating culture, and weaving bonds between what was and what will be.

The country of Ecuador, located in Latin America, has for decades faced chronic human rights challenges, bounded by weak institutions, violence, corruption and restrictions on women’s access to reproductive health care. In hopes for a better life elsewhere and the chance to be reunited, families are often separated. Those journeys can be long, dangerous, sometimes illegal. Yet upon arrival, their hardships are far from over, the dream land may be just as cruel to them.  

As a child of immigrants, I have long admired the paradox of migration where the deep love for one’s country is coupled with the necessity or desire to leave it. 

All voices gathered in the project belong to women from an association of young Ecuadorians living in Switzerland, originally founded decades ago when their mothers and aunts fought to stop mass deportation caused by irregular paper work, managing to historically change the immigration laws in vigor. Generation after generation, these women have carried forward the need to preserve their heritage with resilience through hardship, community through segregation, sisterhood through exile.  

The project takes the form of a book divided in two parts : half is dedicated to the ones who left, where Ecuadorian culture perpetuates and continues to evolve after migration, and the other half to the ones who stayed, where I connected to the family members still living in Ecuador via messages, postcards and letters. They each carry their share of struggles, and long term dreams. Torn apart like paper, I reassembled their shattered stories like different parts of a mosaic that slowly rebuilds itself. 

More than ever, the projects aims to shed light on resemblance over difference, culture celebrations of interwoven communities. It creates a space where culture continues to evolve, vulnerable yet resilient, carried by those who live it and transmit it across borders.