CARTOGRAFÍA EN TRÁNSITODecember 2024
Cartography in Transit is a photographic and installation project in progress that traces the emotional geographies migration inscribes onto the body, through portraits of the people closest to me: friends, companions, and other migrants whose lives have become intertwined with my own.
The project is born from a certainty: the migratory experience transforms the body and the way we relate to others. The people portrayed are the community with whom I have learned to navigate displacement. Their stories intersect with mine, and in their bodies I find fragments of my own experience. In portraying them, the project also becomes an exercise in self-recognition, where my own story is reflected in those who share with me the experience of living in transit.
The portraits present nude, anonymous bodies that shift attention toward the body as our most permanent territory: the place where migration silently transforms memory, belonging, and the way we inhabit the world. Rather than representing individual stories, these bodies invite us to think of migration as a shared experience, one whose emotional traces resonate in different but recognizable ways among those who have lived it.
Migration is often narrated through rupture, absence, and loss. Without denying these experiences, Cartography in Transit is also interested in what comes after: the extraordinary capacity of people to adapt, build new forms of intimacy, and create community out of shared vulnerability. Migration is not solely a process of uprooting; it is also a space of transformation, creativity, and resilience.
Throughout this journey, two constants remain. The first is the body, the only territory that travels with us wherever we go. The second is community: the bonds we build through care, shared vulnerability, and mutual recognition. If migration transforms our relationship with territory, it also transforms our relationship with others.
More than mapping countries or borders, Cartography in Transit maps the invisible networks of belonging that emerge among those who live in movement. It is a cartography traced through bodies, memory, and community; a map of the ways we learn to rebuild a sense of belonging when home ceases to be a place and begins to exist in the bonds we create.