‘Greetings from Rosita aus Peru Brooklyn’
2025
Three-channel digital video (transferred from Super 8 and 16mm), sound, 8:01 min, loop, CRT monitors, metal stands, colored signal cables
Dimensions variable
“Greetings from Rosita aus Peru Brooklyn” (2025) is a short experimental film presented as a three-channel installation that explores the fragmentation of time and space in diasporic memory. The piece addresses connection when the physical or the present is unattainable.
The film shares my mother’s immigrant story in Peru through my lens, while reflecting on my own experience of living in the diaspora in Brooklyn, New York. As I had never seen photographs of my mother as a child, the concept of absence in the archive became prevalent. The work highlights a history of erasure and neglect inherent to colonization that has affected archival practices in indigenous communities. At the same time, it becomes an artistic gesture that fills absence with tenderness, curiosity, and family collaboration.
The work unfolds as an emotional landscape composed of found footage and original material filmed in Peru. The found footage includes a 1960s German educational film that tells the story of Rosita, a young Peruvian girl living in a rural area; additional footage of growing plants; and imagery of the landscape of El Salvador. All found footage was acquired on eBay, where I searched for 16mm films connected to Peru or other Latin American countries that visually resembled Piura. The original footage was recorded in Peru in 2024 during one of my family visits and highlights the neighborhood where I grew up and lived with my mother before migrating to the United States in 2015.
The fragmentation, repetition, and layering in this work are an allegory to the sense of displacement that migrants experience. A constant feeling of not belonging, of being perpetually reconstructing an identity and a sense of home that is no longer there, that has transformed, and that continues to be renewed. However, the positive side in this process of grief is the intention, the willingness to recreate, to make, to finally see where we are from, who we are, and to finally belong.
The installation is on view at the Bronx Museum Seventh AIM Biennial: Forms of Connection | Jan 23 - Sep 6, 2026.
