We Knew the World in Fragments of Color

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.