Delirios Del Desarrollo

This film wasn’t just an idea that came to me, if I’m being honest I never thought I’d end up sharing this much of my real life as my thesis. Somehow the project revealed itself to me naturally. It made sense that this is what I had to tell, what I had to translate into visual art. I immigrated to the U.S. when I was short of being 13 with my dad, my mom, and my two younger siblings. While many people I knew as a kid hoped their dreams would learn how to swim, my parents were fortunate enough to get their dream a plane ticket. We were casted from struggle into struggle, not quite the same kind but struggle nonetheless. I often compare my experience immigrating to uprooting a tree. I can't speak for every immigrant, but many of my own traumas came with replanting my roots. Nine years later I find myself questioning my experience as an immigrant more than I ever had. When we left my mom packed as much memorabilia as she could possibly fit in a checked bag. Now all those special objects fit into 4 small boxes that sit in a closet, in the 7th house we’ve moved into in the last 9 years. How can you fit an entire family’s memories into a couple cardboard boxes? I get the feeling I will never fully belong anywhere, at least not to the extent that the royal palm tree belongs in my homeland. The result is a very eclectic brain, a bunch of misplaced and mismatched objects and memories. Places that I can’t put together. Domestic paradoxes. Houses that don’t feel like my own and homes that feel too confined. People whose faces I can’t quite remember but whose laughs I’ll never forget. A cabinet of curiosities. A collector’s dream, a nightmare for my mental health, and a vanishing point for my art.