Faculty of Art

Photography

Ernesto Cabral de Luna

Lo Que Dejamos (What We Left Behind)

I reorganize the images on this corkboard everytime I move to a new city. The visual content is always changing depending on where I am at in life - but the constant thing is having images of my family. This collage is meant to evoke everything that immigrants leave behind once they immigrate; the people are gone but everything else remains.Similarly, the second piece speaks to things left behind in as it pertains to footage in a home video being corrupted/overexposed.

““A falta de pan, tortillas” is a Mexican refran meaning: adapt to a situation despite wishing for an alternative. For immigrants, this summarizes the mindset required to start a new life in a foreign environment. This body of work is a visual rendition of my family’s journey as immigrants by way of retrieving, appropriating, distorting and repurposing archived identification documents and family photographs. A visual and conceptual trespassing of history and memory, manipulating personal records and expired identification documents allows me to reject and ignore colonial classification systems and bureaucratic procedures. Exploring the relationship between identification and identity - within their new context, there are no complicated administrative procedures required for the existence or validation of these images. The absence, manipulation and erasure of information within this work echoes aspects of life that are (in)voluntarily left behind through the processes of immigration. I am grateful for the people these images represent, for the culture and memories that they preserved, however fragmented, and all the different types of dust these photographs collected.”