The last time I saw my grandmother Viola, I was showing her a Northern Lights through a video call, 9,200 km from home. She passed away a few days later.
Before receiving the call informing me of her death, I heard her voice in the landscape, somewhere between very far away and within me. That evening in Lofoten, I experienced the most intense wind I have ever witnessed; it lifted the water and the sand, and swayed the vehicles. Then I received the call and they confirmed what, in some way, I already knew.
This project is a compilation of fragments of the poetry of my grandmother Viola Carballo, who never studied beyond primary school. Here I combine her poetry, photographs, objects, and paintings from her visual archive with images from the trip I made to Norway at the time of her death.
The result is a contrast between images and texts that evoke the Nordic landscape, and my family archive and my grandmother’s popular creativity. I am interested in confronting ideas of belonging and travel; home and nature; house and universe.
To speak about absence, and to highlight the importance of creation within a domestic and, in a certain sense, marginal context. The familiar and intimate are juxtaposed with the distant and unknown. Am I as much of my living room as I am of the earth? Do I belong to the bed as much as I belong to the glacier or the ocean? My grandmother, Freya, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. A kitchen board, a song, and solar winds.
