Family Album
Recently, Velasquez has experimented with her family album and personal archive, exploring the photographic medium as an active space for self-narration and reconfiguration of history. Departing from vernacular portraiture, the artist uses collage and textiles, to create compositions based on layers. Continuing her study of the Latin American portrait, but this time from a very personal stance, the artist examines the mutability of archival images, the ongoing presence of history in the present day, and the connection between people and material life. Each new composition is a reclamation of history. A disruption of the postures of power, and a personal but important attempt to recenter the terms of a photographic discourse to this day heavily stained by inequality.
-Composing in layers evolves from the structure of the weaving and from the veiling and unveiling that occurs naturally when working with textiles.
-These compositions are silent moments of healing that bring the attention back into the material.
-Each weaving is constructed by hand, thus revealing my body’s presence, which is marked by the unavoidable traces of my labor.
-My work is particularly driven by my admiration for female labor. It is inspired by my mom and my two grandmothers, who used weaving and work with textiles as forms of survival, but also as ways of creative expression.
