Time Capsule

In the last couple of years I have been working on memory, as a sort of sideline, an undertone to my constant questioning of the negotiation between humans and nature.

I believe the questioning of memory crawled up from inside me, as a way of trying to assimilate constant change; multiple  landscapes, contexts, and experiences one after the other.

Memory often comes with nostalgia, even though until now I had treated it very coldly, very logical, as if decoding a structure. But memory has its own ways of working through us, and slowly as it has happened in multiple occasions, for example, I found myself with the sentiments of warmth and complicity I shared with my grandfather. 

My grandfather, Luis Torregrosa, died 6 years ago, he was a very prominent doctor, his head could not be contained within his studio especially after he got senile dementia. His studio was his sanctuary, always organized to the last bit until everything started loosening up...until the final loosen up, the grasp of life. While he lived, his studio was out of boundaries, a rule that seems to have outlived him...He left a widow, 7 children and 16 grandchildren, to this day his things were still untouched, the studio door always closed. 

In dealing with the vestiges of my own memory I wanted to go through the pictures of my grandfather, knowing that there were plenty, but completely unaware of what was to come. In the search for the pictures kept in the studio... I began to wonder what layed behind all the drawers, cabinets, boxes, what all the piles of paper, books, objetcs..etc. were about, and asked permission to dig into it; to organize the tangible remains of my grandfather as well as now being in charge of finding all the very important papers lost in that maze.

It is a weird thing, all the little things we keep... the collection of objects left behind, it is like being on a hunt for hidden treasures, as well as putting together a puzzle of information, as he was highly involved, in research, politics, economics, education and a weird sense of humour... he travelled all over the world, there are boxes and boxes full of slides, with labels such as "when we travelled to the Nordic countries" "the pyramids of Oaxaca" "Rio de Janeiro and Caracas" "Capri" "Japan"... and many unlabelled paths. 

The search for me is about who my grandfather was, and understanding more of myself through that and the strong connection that we shared. Out of all the things I have found until now I decided to keep two things (of course with the permission of my grandmother).

- A photograph of my parents from 1980

- A collection of very poisonous scorpions, collected by my grandmother in 1944 while they lived in Irapuato.