Cristina Velásquez

As If It Were the Sun is a photographic exercise that originates in how we construct identity as an uninterrupted endeavor, where exploration precedes definition. Starting from our own body, identity expands, transforms, and carries the weight of the place we come from, and the people we call our own. I am interested in the places of enunciation, visible and non-visible, where our identities rest. Our freedom resides in our capacity to reveal and conceal fragments of ourselves in acts of self-narration where fiction is welcome.

Photography allows me to explore my identity as a personal means of mending the historically violent and oppressive relationship I inherited with the photographic medium. My work seeks to confront imposed histories and ideas, and reimagine. In an ongoing exercise of re-centering, my work challenges and expands the logic of a canon that has long been complicit in excluding alternative narratives, aesthetics and perspectives from being heard. I reclaim my history and identity to resist the threats of erasure and cultural assimilation. Similarly, I envision photography as a medium for connection, repparation, and fertile ground for critical thinking and pictorial expression.