Cuerpos de Agua ~ Bodies of Water
BFA thesis, Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) University. 2020.
Multimedia installation: cyanotypes on cotton fabric, video projection with sound and digitized VHS tapes.
Exhibited in Making Spaces, curated by Karina Roman Justo, at Sur Gallery in October and November 2020.
"Cuerpos de Agua ~ Bodies of Water" explores body-land relationships, focusing on my experience as an uprooted body. Through a cyanotype on cotton fabric, a video projection with sound and digitized VHS tapes from my personal archives, this body of work examines the embodied experience of displacement and reflects on how the ties my body holds with a specific territory have been transformed by migration. Having grown up in Venezuela, the landscape in which I feel most at home is the Venezuelan-Caribbean coastline and the liminal space of its beaches. When I am away from it, the ties that bind my body with this landscape are not broken, but rather transformed and reconfigured. I point to this figure-ground connection through both the physicality of the work and the specific environment in which it was created: the videos depict it, and the cyanotypes are material results of interactions between my body, photographic chemicals and the sun, ocean, salt and sand.
