En Mi Pais

“En Mi País” is a video installation, Framed as 1 tour with many guides, a voice leads you on, instructing you to keep moving along this imaginary excursion. The characters pace up and down when giving their story, in which the rhetoric and repetitive speech pattern reminiscent of well-rehearsed tours mingled with personal anecdotes of locals to provide commentary on Aruba and on Main Street, which has gone through a rise and decline of prosperity in part as a result of tourism.

In 2018 I was invited to travel to Aruba via Caribbean Linked to present my work there. The trip ended with a presentation in Ateliers ’89 at the Academia di Bellas Artes, where I showed the installation En Mi Pais (2018). This installation plays with the idea that important events are discussed at the table. Because traditions such as eating together with the family at the table in Aruba are changing, I have worked with a projected ‘tour guide’, which through a voice-over reflects changing norms and values in the Caribbean, such as the presence of old and the rise of new capitalist infractures, cultural loss of memory and social problems such as such as addiction and violence. En Mi Pais invited viewers to reflect on questions such as What is the real value if the information and knowledge of what one’s country has to offer merely becomes a repeating dictation and not a self-awareness or understanding of context and cause and effect? Who is investigating, documenting, narrating and showing our multiple selves and social/human needs?