The Covid 19 pandemic was a time of difficulty. Self-reflection and art-making helped me navigate the crisis. I looked at ways to manage my own stress and a growing sense of disconnection from my immediate community and Costa Rican background. This process of self-recognition, criticism, and awareness was aided by auto-ethnography—audio recordings, visual storytelling and essaying. I focused on visualizing memory and developing narratives that reconnected me with my Latin American and female identity and that helped me treat my life-long depression and attention deficit disorder. The lives lost during the pandemic brought back painful memories of my own mother’s illness and passing 15 years prior, bringing me closer to numerous mementos and items from the past, stored for many years. Textures, aromas, colors, and patters resurfaced as fundamental elements of a visual language that I started to noticed soon after I began developing Coqueterías—a year-long, self-initiatited project in 2022, consisting on the daily production of visual compositions and memory capturing those episodes of trauma, PTSD, fear, and disconnection that resulted from the pandemic’s long episodes of isolation.
The images below are selected from the collection.
