All the memories I have of my grandma Mari come in pieces. She migrated from a small town in the south of Spain named Almayate, in the region of Andalusia. Her mom died when she was a child. She went to Barcelona. Spain was going through a dictatorship at that time. She had a painful divorce. She loved eating bread and bananas. She died when I was four. My brain keeps trying to convince me that she is the one holding me in one of my favorite archival images. But she is not. So much of her life was marked by pain, and that translated into silence.

The body of work "Zarcillo" grows from my will to reach a past no longer accessible, by creating an archive between fact and fiction. It reflects on inheritance through symbolic reconstructions of memories in “abuela” Mari’s birthplace Almayate. This excavation process departs from personal memories, familial archives, contemporary interviews, theoretical readings, photographic reenactments, and observations of traces in the landscape of Almayate’s town. Its main goal is to explore how memory articulates narratives of belonging within the matrilineal lineage of family. Especially in Spain after the Civil War (1936-1939) and during the Francoist dictatorship era.

At the same time, “Zarcillo” establishes a fantastical taxonomy of the region’s quotidian. It engages with landscape elements that carry traces of a past marked by violences and shortages. By bringing them to an imaginary terrain, the artist aims to reconfigure their rules of engagement with the present, hoping new understandings of reality will emerge from it. The tension manifested in adult bodies reenacting memories from previous generations, sometimes originally performed in places that do not exist anymore, evidences the impossibility of fully accessing the past.

“Zarcillo” is an Andalusian word that refers to earrings, but also to the cuts that animals would have in their ears to be distinguished by their owner, as well as the structures that plants create to hold themselves to other external supports and bodies.