EN TIERRA FICTICIA

En tierra ficticia (On Fictitious Land), is a multimedia project composed of interviews with the artist’s female-identified relatives. In these intimate conversations, the women recount formative stories that shaped their identities as women living in domestic-rural Puerto Rico. These interviews are interwoven with satellite imagery of the region, sourced from a United States government database. The imagery spans from the women’s childhoods and progresses in parallel with their recollections.

Each interview’s audio has been transformed into a distinct digital piece that merges satellite images of the areas inhabited by the women with metric visualizations generated from their voice frequencies. These pieces allow the women to visually and metaphorically reframe the physical spaces that once held their trauma.

The project seeks to highlight the limitations and data loss inherent in remote perception technologies such as satellite imagery, while emphasizing the urgency of preserving oral histories that might otherwise be forgotten.

Through En tierra ficticia, perspectives on place are reconstructed through lived experience, resisting fictionalization. The work stands as a collaborative offering from the artist’s family to the audience, an invitation to reflect on the truthfulness of memory and the ways it is reshaped over time, with or without agency.

Alfredo Zapata De Jesús

R:LDC_ADV_2DA_EXT

(2024)

Video, audio

00:08:34

*DURATION HAS BEEN REDUCED FOR SHOWCASING PURPOSES