The work that I do has so much to do with life, existence, and happiness.
And it has to be personal.
I chose to go with a story that is very, very dear to me to someone who is extremely close
to me and that's my mom.
My mom grew up in poverty and she decided to come to the United States at the age of
16 and that journey was very intense.
That journey almost killed her, crossing Mexico.
There's so many layers to that story.
For me, first as a child growing up, the first version that I hear was just about the journey.
You know, oh, I came here to have a better life, but then it gets more elaborate, you
know, about what happened on the way there, how the bus that she was in was stopped by
the police and everyone got turned back except her because she was 16 with a beautiful face.
The bus accident happened and she woke up in the Red Cross in Mexico and was in the
hospital for a month before she continued her journey.
So you have so many layers to this and of course the older I got, the more that story
was elaborated.
Eventually the last version is love.
She chose to come to America because she had a boyfriend at the age of 16 that came to
California and made it and they wrote letters back and forth to each other.
She figured, well, I have nothing to lose by going there because I love this man.
So I knew that I had to make a work about this because there's so much involved in it
that anyone can relate to.
This is an interesting thing because she is displaced in the sense that she's not where
she's from, she's not from a native land, but she's never lost a sense of identity.
I think she's one of the most courageous, honest, sincere, beautiful humans I've ever
met in my life.
Displacement has also another definition of transferring an intense emotion from one
subject to another.
It's not just about knowing her story, but it's also about what is meant to me.
What is meant to me emotionally throughout my life, how I get to look at the world around
me through knowing and listening to that story growing up.
And is this in just the plot of us, just about storytelling in general, like it's one of
the main forms of communicating, of building relationships, just knowing about each other's
past.
How do we all connect to human beings, and I knew that's one way to do it, of knowing
that displacement means one intense feeling from one subject to another.
And I think that's definitely an idea you'd be able to see in the work.
