ABSENTIA
Absentia is a project that narrates a return journey to my home country after living in Canada as an immigrant for over a decade. I left Mexico in 2003. Several years into my relocation I came to the realization that I was learning more about Latin America than I ever did while living in Mexico. Most of my friends in Canada are of Latin American descent. My connection with this group of people planted in me the idea of a return trip that would require a protracted detour through South America and the Caribbean. I wanted to visit my friends’ home countries as a way to understanding them better, but also as a way to reconnect with my roots.
I started this journey in 2013. I visited Colombia, Ecuador, Perú, Chile, Argentina, Cuba, and so on. The project became a method of comprehending my history in Canada and of my native territory—in short, it was a way of renewing, or returning to, myself.
With this work I explore the necessity of coming to terms with cultural identity while also acknowledging its limits. By drawing connections between memory, territory, and presence, Absentia also addresses the more fraught themes of nostalgia, longing, and loss.
One of the many outcomes of Absentia is a photobook composed of seven booklets, each 32 pages long. Each booklet is dedicated to my experience navigating one of seven cities: Cali, Quito, Lima, Buenos Aires, Havana, La Paz, and Santiago de Chile. Each also features texts adapted from my travel journals. As fragmentary chronicles of experiences, of comings and goings, of observations and mysteries, these texts, written in the present tense, are intended not to explain or illustrate the images but rather to juxtapose the exterior and the interior, the visible and the invisible, the seen and the felt.
Each booklet features a different type of paper, has an individual cover, and experiments with different printing processes, including laser and inkjet printing. The seven booklets are housed in a handmade cardboard box. Each booklet measures 8.5 × 5.5 × 0.5 inches. The edition consists of 100 handmade copies, all produced by the artist. Absentia was developed through the Photobook Incubator Program at Hydra + Fotografía in Mexico City.