MEMORIA STRATA
Artist Statement
Memoria Strata emerged from a question that had been gradually taking shape within my work. What happens to memory when we leave a place, and what remains of us in the objects, materials and relationships we carry with us or leave behind?
My own experience of migration led me to approach that question through the history of the Cuban diaspora and, increasingly, through the broader experience of Latin American displacement. I became interested in those who leave, but also in those who remain. The parents separated from children, children raised by grandparents, families reconstructed across borders, and lives divided between places that can no longer be experienced as a single home.
The title Memoria Strata refers to memory as something accumulated in layers. I think of the human body as a territory composed of strata, those experiences, absences, objects, documents and places deposited over time. In these works, portraiture becomes a point of departure rather than an end. The person represented is gradually intertwined with the material evidence of a biography until image, biography and territory can no longer be separated.
This process has transformed the material language of my work.
Soil, roots, wood, jute, fibers, textiles, documents and recycled objects enter paintings, sculptures and installations as carriers of experience.
Cuts, sutures, knots and suspended elements introduce physical acts of separation and attachment.
Resin encapsulates some of these fragments, preserving them like archaeological remains and turning the work into a kind of contemporary time capsule.
Objects occupy a particularly important place in the project. A telephone, a paper airplane, a rosary, a piece of luggage, an old window or a fragment of wood can contain histories that exceed their ordinary function. They become witnesses. Their scratches, wear and imperfections are not erased because they are precisely what allow the object to carry the passage of time into the work.
The spiral remains present, but its role has changed. In The Spiral Cannot Expand, it embodied the tension between growth and containment. In Memoria Strata, it enters the human body and the spaces surrounding it. It can bind, interrupt, connect or hold two separated parts under tension. The spiral is no longer only a metaphor for restricted expansion; it becomes a structure through which I investigate attachment and the difficulty of separation.
At the center of Memoria Strata is therefore not migration understood simply as movement from one country to another, but the material and emotional residue that displacement leaves behind. I am interested in the space between departure and permanence, between what is preserved and what disappears, and in the objects and materials that continue to carry memory when people are no longer there.
I do not attempt to reconstruct a complete history through these works. I am interested in its fragments, the things that survive, the gaps that cannot be filled and the layers that accumulate around absence. Memoria Strata is an evolving archive of those traces -a place where matter becomes witness and memory acquires physical form.
