BACK TO PLAYA SAN BLAS
Navigating grief, love, and liminality, this practice-led research project is informed by my mixed-race identity as a Salvadoran woman born in Australia. Privileging the knowledge generated from intuition, I use autoethnographic research such as oral histories, family photographs and visiting El Salvador to negotiate the tensions between multiple modes of existence- between physical, emotional, and ancestral worlds. In an exploration of how time, memory and lived experience intersect to manifest a dynamic, restless, and fragmented positionality to the family archive, I explore the inherited knowledge and ongoing negotiations within diasporic and Latina phenomenological identity.
Prioritising the matrilineal line through an intuitive, feminist, and embodied making methodology, the research employs non-traditional textile and labour practices to create large-scale tufted rugs that creatively draw on extensive photographic family archives. These rugs amplify women’s stories—particularly that of my Abuelita, who passed away in 2018 and was the first in our family to migrate from El Salvador to Australia. In doing so, the research honours women’s work through acts of care and making, where I reassemble the archive—or re-archive it—as an attempt to locate a sense of self and belonging through inherited knowledges.
