Alma

• Prize
  Gold in Fine Art/Abstract
• Photographer
  Bea Zamora C.

This body of work is the result of my personal concerns in relation of my family background three generations back, specially on my father’s side where a lack of information exists on different matters, for example, my great grandmother’s name or family name and what was the cause of her death, among others. My interests fluctuate between the silence, the secrets and the lack of memory between the members of my family. The philosophy of ALMA relies on my investigations on Psychogenealogy, which treats the patient’s illnesses or traits as unconscious connections of issues that have been passed on from his or her ancestors. From this point of view, the soul of a family issue is something that hasn’t been solved within generations, since our story is defined by the loyalties, the rights, the duties and the rituals that are interfering with our goals and dreams. In these images, all black and white diptychs, I try to convey a dialogue between light and darkness to represent the lack of family information and so to create another story; a recreation of the forgotten or silenced biographies of my grandparents and their parents, and therefore my own. This is a story which takes place in Palestinian territories, in Arabic language and under the Orthodox Catholic Church, and develops between wars, forced displacements and migrations which intertwine the melancholy and the solitude of a permanent alienation.