True Mother

True Mother rewrites the fabric of family memory through the lens of adoption. Woven between photographs and textiles reflecting the faces of myself and my mother, the project stitches together a kinship born from the reinvention of memory.

True Mother emerges from the affirmation of a reinvented memory, understood as a gesture of reinscribing family memory marked by adoption. As an adopted daughter, I grew up under the weight of a phrase I so often heard: “she is your pretend mother.” This symbolic inscription produced affective ruptures and identity destabilizations, displacing the notion of belonging into a zone of conflict and silence. The work is born from this place of fracture, activating what Freud defined as the return of the repressed, what was silenced in childhood reappears, transformed into artistic materiality. In True Mother, I wear my mother’s dress and recreate a series of portraits based on photographs I once took of her. In this gesture, our images overlap, as if the photographic act could reinscribe onto the body the interdicted bond. In dialogue with Roland Barthes, who in Camera Lucida identifies in photography the punctum, that which wounds, touches, and unsettles, the work positions itself as an attempt to render visible the intimate wound of adoption, converting it into a space of creation. Alongside the photographs, I expand the series onto textiles, where my portraits are mirrored with those of my mother, creating a surface of contact in which differences and resemblances intertwine, affirming kinship as a sensitive and plural experience. It is not about seeking a lost unity, but rather about asserting that being mother and daughter does not depend on blood, but on the creation of a reinvented memory, one capable of transforming absence into a counter-archive, inscribing, between images and fabrics, other ways of belonging.