Self-portraits / Self-fictions

My first approach to photography was through the genre of selfportrait.
With the camera in front of me I discovered the posibility to use my body to present and represent ideas, questions, desires, fears; to explore the social construct of feminity embeded in the culture I grew up in and to develop a way to comunicate with others beyond the spoken or written language.

The following is a selection of photos that I have made since 2010.








Update: 2019
El camino de la mestiza / the Mestiza Way.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. P. 104 - 105.

(...) Her first step is to take inventory. Despojando, desgranando, quitando paja. Just what did she inherit from her ancestors? This weight on her back. (...) Pero es difícil differentiating between lo heredado, lo adquirido, lo impuesto. She puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been a part of. Luego bota lo que no vale, los desmientos, los desencuentros, el embrutecimiento. Aguarda el juicio, hondo y enraízado, de la gente antigua. This step is a conscious rupture with all oppresive traditions of all cultures and religions. She communicates that rupture, documents the struggle.

She reinterprets history, and using new symbols, she shapes new myths. She adopts new perspectives toward the darkskinned, women and queers. She strengthens her tolerance (and intolerance) for ambiguity. She is willing to share, to make herself vulnerable to foreign ways of seeing and thinking. She surrenders all notions of safety, of the familiar. Deconstruct, construct. She becomes a nahual, able to transform herself into a tree, a coyote, into another person. She learns to transform the small "I" into the total Self. Se hace moldeadora de su alma. Según la concepción que tiene de sí misma, así será.