Lidris che a continuiN

Lidrîs che a continuin begins with a question: 

What reaches us from lives we did not live?

The series grew out of a genealogical research process that began with a return to a place from my childhood and gradually expanded into the lives of the generations that came before me. Through family photographs, documents, records, objects, places, and oral histories, I began encountering people I had never known, stories that had been passed down, and others that had disappeared or were only beginning to emerge.

I am not interested in reconstructing the past as a complete or fixed narrative. I am interested in what happens when these fragments are looked at again from the present, when memory meets evidence, when family stories meet the archive, and when what we thought we knew is altered by what we discover.

As an Argentine immigrant living in the United States, researching the migrations of my own ancestors has also changed the way I understand my experience. 

Their journeys and mine are separated by generations and very different circumstances, yet questions of place, belonging, distance, language, what is left behind, and what is carried forward continue to resonate.

Drawing becomes part of that investigation. To draw a person who died before I was born is to spend hours looking at a face I cannot remember. I cannot know that person in the way I know someone from my own memory, but through the act of drawing, looking becomes another kind of encounter between their time and mine.

Lidrîs che a continuin moves between what is remembered, inherited, documented, imagined, lost, transformed, and still waiting to be discovered. Looking backward, for me, is not about remaining in the past. It is a way of asking what has reached us, what continues through us, and what we choose to carry forward.