Kodak Color film that was initially exposed in the summer of 2019. I had it developed for me by an underclassmen (thank you). I was filled with pride, seeing my matriarchs archived in film. Some day, I want to show them these images. My grandmothers, however, are a long distance away in El Salvador. I wanted to imagine a gallery space for them and picture them walking through it. My great Aunt Filiberta would feel rightfully celebrated and my grandmother Ma Alicia would probably feel a little bashful. In picturing myself with them I wanted to make sure to separate my perspective from theirs. I'm still the one behind the camera.

I made collages with scans of photos my mother took in El Salvador after the 7.6 earthquake of January, 2001. I wanted to highlight the people in the photos rather than the debris. My intention was to mirror the perspective that my mother had during the taking of the pictures; it was personal. I think some people might be wary to treat images of destruction as something that can only exist as itself because of the emotional weight it holds. I'm still trying to figure out what collaging these photos mean to me as an art maker. For now, it's about viewing the photos through intimacy rather than as a spectator two decades later. I hesitated putting direct images of myself into the collages since my place as the first generation born in America inherently distances me from what happened, but I think the quality of the image let me play into the transparent nature of memories. The context of the final image has been changed; the destruction of war is different than that of natural disasters. My mom tells me that people from the country side came to towns to offer help after the earthquake. The soldiers in the image are receiving tomatoes to distribute while these two old men were fixing something up that was left.

My process with collages has changed a lot over time. I first started with hatred, inspired by twitter user rf9weu8hjf78923 who was trying to make a funny edit of an image, only to mess up the image dimensions and out of frustration "destroyed" their image. Having agency over your own work and destroying it in your terms was really powerful and funny to me. I changed my intentions with my work later on. Now I just want to have fun and start talking about histories that are important to me.