Altars for Estela | POY Latam

Here, at home, we keep dreaming of returning to spaces where we could play with clouds, earth, light. These are moments to return to the essential. Here, between rituals, time is running out. (I propose: we wish to return, that is, we long to return, …. I also propose: “Time goes by”, which is time goes by while “time is running out”, which means time is running out). Here at home, do we keep dreaming of returning to spaces where we can play with the clouds, the earth, the light? These are moments to return to the essential. Here, between the rituals, time is running out.

I was thinking of my mother, who gave birth at least three times; an indigenous woman inhabiting the plains and the Amazon before the Constitutional Reform of 1991, without knowing how to read and write, or being registered.

Salt for this evil eye, fire to burn this colonial mandate, plants to heal my patriarchal wounds.

I search the archive over and over again, trying to make the past and the few memories I have reveal something to me. I search the archive over and over again, trying to make the past and the few memories I have reveal something to me.

I think of every single thing that has been part of that story, which I may never get to talk about.

When anxiety or meaninglessness invades me, I look at the pictures that were taken of us, that I took to think over and over again in that instant.

Starting point. I was 18 years old. I had only seen my mother in a passport photo that I had kept since I was 4 years old and had lost when I was 16; that photo was my mother and the affirmation of her existence.

I tried to escape the sadness by writing, through photography, and later, with art, but something was still there. My mother’s death began to echo; I knew that perhaps her absence was connected.

Our own land was bathed in blood, grandmother was beaten for speaking our language, we are destined not to belong.

I never felt I missed her until that time, one day before my first trip.

I will invent rituals, gestures not to find its winds, I will build a house, I will watch the plants grow.

It wasn’t right when my father laughed at me because my grandmother was maybe an Indian lost in the jungle with other Indians; or because my uncles and grandparents told me that my mother had killed a dog in front of them, that the scars on my arms and chest maybe she had made them.

I knew that being a mother would be difficult, but I felt violated by a set of external ideas that told me that I could not be a mother, that women like me, Indian and peripheral, should not reproduce.

I looked at the moon and saw her figure, I saw my ancestors, I felt protected, I felt saved.

I visited her best friend from Cali and the woman I thought would be my godmother. She took several photos of her memories: in one she was holding me as a newborn in a red dress (I lost all but this one).

Collect dead plants for mom, make an altar, go back to cry for a little while.

The first time I felt his call was in November 2009. I was about to cross the Atacama Desert, I felt death and madness kissing me.

I have the need to inhabit the houses that did not contain me.

Their gun god brings bombs so they can’t return to this earth.

Exiles, unknowing victims, born in another land. You will not carry weapons.

I seek to inhabit and leave altars in the waters and lands of Estela, my mother, to intervene in the landscape that has witnessed the loss of our identities and memories. Estela was an indigenous woman and sex worker. I search for her in ritual explorations, the construction of archives and cartographies. From the age of 6 I thought she was dead. At 18, I was given several photos I didn’t have of her. I only had one passport-sized photo of Estela. I lost all my mother’s photographs, except for one that I managed to scan in 2007, as if her image wanted to disappear.

In 2009, I dreamed of inhabiting the places she walked in life. In 2014, I made the first collage of her search with my daughter Elena. In 2015, I arrived in Yopal to not find her and to understand that she had disappeared in a territory crossed by the armed conflict. In 2016, I traveled to Villavicencio, the place where she lived her childhood. On the way, my cousin gave me the second photo I have of my mother online. In 2021, I managed to inhabit Granada in the Llanos and the Colombian Amazon, places where I lived with my mother until I was 4 years old and where she found her mother, my grandmother, in San José del Guaviare. To inhabit our land is so difficult that the only thing left to do was not to exist in order to survive.