Marielena Ferrer, Masking Identities: Rebuilding deterritorialized cultural memories
Artist’s statement:
My paintings and sculptures are part of my larger desire to help people become aware of their identities and their surroundings as fully as possible.
“Identity” is how we perceive, regard and express ourselves, an enduring and continuous sense of who we are. I use the plural “identities” to emphasize that our identity is fluid and shifts throughout our lives, including how we aspire to be.
For those of us living far from our places of origin, creating colorful expressions of art can help preserve our personal and cultural identities, while maintaining a bond to the lives we knew. It also lets us explore, decide, declare, express, experience and question ideas about our identities over time.
Marielena Ferrer
Every migration usually involves a long, slow and painful process of acculturation of uncertain conclusion; a traumatic experience whose effects, not always visible, promote a radical crisis of identity to the extent that migrants, deprived of the comforting cushion of their culture and society of origin, must confront, alone and naked, primordial fears.
This installation explores migrant culture –or the culture in diaspora– which is marked by estrangement and psychosocial dissociation so that the migrant always feel in transit, suspended between two worlds.
