Saturas

EDITION

2023, Special mention

school

Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain

Links

@caroljy_18

For me, it is of utmost importance to connect with both my emotions and those of the public through my work; even if their interpretation is not the same, I aim to strike a chord and trigger reflections on others through my projects, so that they can find themselves in them and relate them to their own experiences, thus connecting the individual with the universal. Based on this principle, my work resembles an intimate diary composed of self-portraits, family archives or old photos of unknown people, as well as mixed video footage; intervening those materials through techniques such as embroidery, collage and chemical procedures. Suturas, my first series, is a project that allowed me to heal one of the biggest pains in my life: my family’s story. Through the creation of this project, I had the opportunity to reconnect with my history and remember —thanks to the oral account of the people closest to me during my childhood— many of the parts that I had decided to forget as a way to protect myself from the violence, the abandonment and the emotional absence of my caregivers. My intention was to bring the original family archive to a visual version closer to my experiences, re-signifying the memories of it. It seemed important to me to represent the forgetfulness and randomness of memory, since many times my family members' stories contradicted each other. To do so, I replaced some fragments of the photos with cyanotype and kallitype development errors that I recycled throughout the project, as well as intervening the photos by extracting people or fragments with cuts or chemicals. I was also interested in the thread as a means to resemble the stitches of a suture; and inspired by the Japanese technique of Kintsugi —where the fractures are made visible through gold— used the golden thread as a way to show the beauty in the reconstruction. Suturas is a work that honors the past but gives new meaning to traumatic memories, seeking to heal emotional and generational wounds. Throughout this project, I was able to reconstruct my history and heal myself in a symbolic but also real way. Each stitch represents my internal process of forgiving and making peace with things as they were. It also speaks of my need to break myself in order to rebuild myself up again.