Transcultural displacement and dépaysement: A longing for a sense of home in a foreign environment.

I was born in Guatemala and have lived throughout the United States since my twenties. Yet I have never fully belonged in either place. In the U.S., I am often asked to explain my human condition, where I am from? How do you say your name? Within the Latin American community, I remain a minority within a minority. And when I return to Guatemala, I do not quite fit in either. My accent has shifted, my clothes label me as different, and my lived experience separates me from those I once called my own. I’ve become a hidden immigrant, someone who looks like they belong, yet doesn’t. Ever a foreigner, always neither here, nor there, I exist in a space between identities and cultures, and this environment has become the foundation of my work. Art is where I build my sense of home.

My practice investigates the emotional and material conditions of cultural displacement, foreignness, and the impermanence of memory. The installations I create are informed by fragments of lived experience and shaped by materials that evoke the familiar, the perishable, and the intimate. I often work with edible and biodegradable elements like honey, milk, mandarin peels, baguettes, coffee, and plantain chips. These materials carry with them poetics of domestic associations and cultural histories, while also pointing to impermanence, decay and environmental fragility. My choice of materials is personal and intuitive. A memory triggers a material, and in turn, the material guides the work.

Many of my pieces are constructed in series or multiples, allowing the material of one to inform the next. This process creates a conversation between works and an evolving, continuous body of exploration. The ephemeral nature of my materials reinforces the transient themes within the work. I’ve used toasted white bread that dried and cracked within days, it gradually diminished, it became stale, broke, and eventually disappeared. The work, like memory and identity, was never meant to remain unchanged.

I am also deeply interested in proxemics; the study of spatial relationships, and I often treat the viewer as an active material of the work. I design my installations to be entered, felt, and remembered. I aim to shift perception, inviting viewers to engage with their surroundings and the new environments and reconsider their place within them.

My work offers a space for reflection, both personal and within the common unconscious. It is a home for those who do not fully belong, a place where Third Culture Kids (TCKs) and others navigating hybrid identities might recognize themselves. I hope the work’s aesthetic jitters lingers, even after it vanishes. I hope it invites others to imagine what it means to belong; a home that speaks in many materials, many tongues. A home that disappears but is never truly gone.