Cuerpos de Agua ~~~ Bodies of Water

Install (3D rendering)

"Cuerpos de Agua ~ Bodies of Water" explores body-land relationships, focusing on my experience as an uprooted body. The installation, encompassing video performance, sound, photography and textiles, examines what my body has gone through and how its ties to a specific territory are 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. The works in the installation depict this space, or were materially produced there. When I am away from it, the tie that binds my body with the land is 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 video performance depicts it, and the cyanotype is the result of an interaction between my body, photographic chemicals and the sun, ocean, salt and sand. Every time I visit, the landscape and I give something to each other. Exposing and washing the cyanotype at the beach materialized that exchange. Producing work when I visit Venezuela, and then making sense of it when I return to Canada, is a way to cope with displacement’s effects on my sense of belonging. Through their encounter with the work, my hope is that viewers can also be transported to the lands that make their bodies feel grounded.