Wood and cardboard, stick and box, house and suitcase, Wood and cardboard, stick and box, house and suitcase, Wood and cardboard, stick and box, house and suitcase, Wood and cardboard, stick and box, house and suitcase…. …

I stand in the missing place in between. In the place of forgetting an expression in my mother tongue, or thinking twice about how my accent sounds nowadays. Or the doorway of my grandma’s house in Los Teques, the positioning of the door, or the plant next to it. The crossroad between where I am, what I remember and what I’m trying not to forget.

My body of work combines the use of gestures and found materials, in the act of approaching memory as an active verb. The permeability of these memories, to become distant from their origin, burying the effort of recollecting them. As an action, it is a constant effort to grasp what was, failing to reach, left with the remains, what my body can hold. Like the skeleton of a house, without walls, see through.

In this sense I’m interested in my own internal images and associations from where I come from as well as the collective and personal narratives found in the outsider, the witness, their own memories and connection to malleable natural materials, their memories.

I found the sticks in an improvisation exercise, where I found myself collecting sticks. In this amassing action I felt myself heavy, with every stick. Walls were made. A house was built at that moment. I realized I had done this before, and it is a recurring weight of this moving and leaving. I try to remember all the houses, my grandmas, my own one, my friends. Especially those I cannot go back to, looking through the cracks of one that can crumble with a push. That will go down and up again.

Sticks and boxes, wood and cardboard.

This box was before a suitcase, and the suitcase was a box, a container of sorts, going back to one specific moment where I saw all of them transporting an entire family. Not ourselves physically, but who we were, if they got lost or didn’t arrive, who would we have been?

I consciously and subconsciously have changed, rearranged, and transgressed these materials. I started from a box, squared into a corrugated, wet and soggy. Back to a square again, but I need to leave some behind, rip some, leave some. Because it doesn’t fit in my pocket.

These works for me are different tries to summarize these past years, gesture to them and to come to terms with the impossibility of returning to the initial image I had. For these pieces and for where they come from.

These are different scenes that I set for myself to remember or forget. Where actions occurred, materials and memories were boxed, carried and moved. They’re about movement, actions that I propose to myself, trying to understand the distance between here and there. The still remaining distance… deshilachandola…