Linaje Dorado

In 2020 I started collecting images from my family’s archive, digging through my grandparents' drawers, in their hometown of Palmilla, in search of my identity. Wanting to connect with my ancestral roots –immigrant family, looking to transcend after escaping death. It is from those distant lands, the dead sea and deserts that I find these images of infinite formats, they are our photos and when I see them, I see a piece of me.

Arabian eyes, cinnamon skin, clandestine accent engraved in each one of them. A golden lineage. We lived a forced exile or several during the last century, wars and a dictatorship, state violence, the imprint we carry.

History repeats itself, and life begins to connect: survival, migration, resistance or death.

How did the archives last so long, how does memory endure through time?

My most predominant roots are Palestinian. The Al Yateem, we come from Bet Sahour and we also plant olive trees in this distant village of Palmilla. But life and resistance repeat themselves in a permanent cycle, exile pushes my family to Mexico and life mixes everything up again. My mother inherited from there her way of speaking, her sayings, her memory... and I grew up with all her traits too.

I was born in Chile, yet I recognize myself with all this shared heritage. I grew up listening to stories from my grandparents and great-grandparents, mom, aunts, uncles, cousins, all paisanos from Palmilla. We grew up picking grape leaves from the grapevines to make warak dawali, and every time someone dies we commemorate and say goodbye with a traditional Taja. And every time we celebrate life the flavors become spicy, and the colors glow in our Mexican styled home; and if we need protection, we pray to the virgencita of Guadalupe.

The archive is like a treasure and I continue its legacy.

In my hands I keep the stories of my ancestors. Observing every detail, I find in them a story that I hope never ends.

The wound of the past is deep and every day I resignify it. Proud of my past, grateful for the resistance that brought us here, of the features on my skin, of our traditions, of the strength I inherited and of the tenderness that never left us.

*This work is composed of photographs of my authorship in 35mm, digital and family archives, experimenting with different techniques and formats to create images of photographic emulsion under the vandyke technique, salted paper (silver emulsion), cyanotype and archival intervention.