We Knew the World in Fragments of Color

© Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project © Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project © Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project View all images ↓
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We Knew the World in Fragments of Color reflects on personal migration from Venezuela to the United States. Through staged photographs and handcrafted costumes, it explores memory, fragmentation, diaspora, and belonging through colour and symbolism.

We Knew the World in Fragments of Color reflects on Victoria Ruiz’s experience of being born in Venezuela during political turmoil and leaving her native country for the United States at a young age.

Utilising handcrafted full-body suits — drawing from Latin American cultural symbolism, spirituality, and a strong chromatic language — the artist stages a sequence of photographs in which the subjects convey meaning against a coloured backdrop.

Across this series, she represents successive stages of Venezuela’s recent reality, each carrying its distinct historical and emotional weight. Meanwhile, through performative self-representation, her internal world unfolds as one shaped by fragmentation and tension resulting from displacement.

The work traces her attempt to reconstruct the scattered fragments of her passage across geographies and states of being, shaped by nostalgia and by the persistent scrutiny placed upon migrant identity — particularly that of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States.

Meaning is embedded through richly layered symbols, from floral choices and costume details to a palette alive with colour and shadow. Dreamlike imagery unfolds through the perspective of a child suspended between worlds, capturing the quiet shifts of hope and uncertainty that accompany the experience of immigration; a perspective in which everything feels familiar and strange at once.

In this sense, memory is reimagined as fractured yet luminous: like shards of tinted glass refracting identity, resilience, and faith. The work is a meditation on fragmentation as a condition of migration that does not seek coherence but rather embraces multiplicity, suggesting that belonging is not recovered but continually assembled.

Through a kaleidoscope of memory, displacement, and spirituality, Ruiz reflects on how life between worlds reshapes perception, and colour itself becomes a language of survival and belonging.

© Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project
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In this image, colour is a political language. Red signals fear and control, blue a fragile unity. The pursuit of power fractures society, leaving the people as the primary casualty, yet even in this tension, hope endures.

© Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project
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In a land of vibrant hues, there is no space for a shade of empathy, freedom, or unity. Red dominates — “the colour I grew up with, the colour I learned to fear.”

© Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project
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This image symbolises the connection between two Venezuelan migrants through a language of exposure and concealment. Standing side by side, they wear long, layered fringes and sculptural floral head coverings, all rendered in hues that evoke the colours of the Venezuelan flag.

© Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project
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The covered faces allude to the experience of imposter syndrome — the feeling of inhabiting a reality that does not fully belong to oneself. Being Venezuelan in exile can feel like existing in a simulation, where identity feels performed rather than lived. Forced migration produces a disorienting rupture, rendering the familiar strange and the self uncertain.

© Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project
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Rooted in personal memory, this image reflects a childhood marked by the constant presence of violence, a world in which fear functioned as an invisible structure within daily life.

© Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project
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This image presents Venezuela as a nation of immense vibrancy and richness that has endured a prolonged struggle, its promise systematically devastated and stripped of its natural and human wealth.

© Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project
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This image examines the internal conflict of missing and loving home while grappling with disappointment. It embodies intense passion and deep yearning, interwoven with the pain of loss.

© Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project
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Approximately 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country, making it one of the largest migration crises in the Americas and the world. The Spiderman masked figure reappears with a bow and arrow pointing upward. The image represents the experience of being forced to leave one’s homeland, departing with little more than memories and the vibrant colours that once touched the skin.

© Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project
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Here, the towering figure reappears in the Venezuelan tricoloured flag, as a reminder that we are far more than the polarised perceptions into which we are boxed. Venezuela is not black and white, nor a binary dispute. It is a country replete with complexities and nuances as infinite as the chromatic spectrum that unfolds from the three primary colours.

© Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project
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Amid hardship and displacement, this scene offers a moment of comfort, showing that community is not just bloodlines or hierarchies but the people who choose to stand with you in the present, those who help construct a shared world when everything feels uncertain.

© Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project
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Here the flowered figures from all the scenes come together in an embrace, their arms intertwining in a subtle gesture of connection and care. It suggests that for those who leave behind familiar homes, family becomes a fluid and living thing forged through trust, presence and shared struggle.

© Victoria Ruiz - Image from the We Knew the World in Fragments of Color photography project
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Against a vibrant turquoise backdrop, five figures stand together, each in a distinct hue, surrounding a drum. The scene suggests ritual and celebration, a moment in which tradition and memory converge to honour ancestors and the spiritual currents that move through us.

We Knew the World in Fragments of Color by Victoria Ruiz

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