Exhibited in the lobby of the Davis Museum, Wellesley College
Fragments for the History of Displacement is based on the recounted experience of 13 Latin American immigrants to the United States of America, each arriving in the US as an adult. The entry doors are installed in the lobby of the museum, leaning against the windows and blocking the outside view. Each door has a peephole fitted with double convex lenses, turning each vista upside down. The viewers can hear each immigrant’s stories and memories from earbuds installed at the narrator’s ear height in the doors. The piece explores the iterative experience of loss, its unutterable quality, and its active irresolution, and draws attention to this relentless and exhausting experience.
12 entry doors installed laying directly against the lobby windows of the Davis Museum. Each of the doors has a peak hole that has been modified with double convex lenses so that everything seen through them appears inverted. To the side of the peak hole I installed a small headphone for sound. During a period of four months I went around having conversations with people that immigrated to the US as adults. I was interested in looking for people that had to start from scratch forming new memories and having to leave behind memories and identity. Those conversations can be heard through the headphones installed in the doors when the viewer gets close enough to look through the peak hole. The lenses are located at the exact height of the person that you hear. My intention was to replicate each person’s horizon line. All the conversations are both in Spanish and English but fragmented and rotating in a random manner. There is also one door that has no voice but sounds of different spaces.
Detail of door and lens
Detail of door and lens
Detail through lens
Detail through lens
Detail through lens