Cellular Memory

Statement

Cellular memory, territory, and ancestral dance

There are movements that arise from silence. There are turns that come from the pain of those who came before. There are pauses that are nothing more than other stories that continue to beat within me. And yet, all of this builds me, inhabits me, defines me.

What seemed to be my own is revealed to be shared. What I believed to be new is ancestral. I discover myself as a channel, a bridge between times. As if each bodily movement resonated with the echoes of an entire lineage. 

Dancing is also an act of listening, of surrender, of openness to what cannot be seen but can be felt. Of recognizing that my body is not a boundary, but a living archive, a fertile field where the seeds of the past germinate. 

In every cell there is a story that wants to be told without words, through gesture, pulse, tremor. The land that saw me grow up is not just a place: it is an extension of my body, a skin older than my own, furrowed with memories that I do not know if they are mine, but that shape me. 

The intimate geography of my existence is a territory that cannot be seen on maps, lives that still vibrate in the air, voices that echo, a living presence that beats to the rhythm of my own heart. It was the scent of the river, like a living being, green and earthy, present in the diary, a unique, ancestral fragrance. Its waters taught me that everything flows, even pain, even inherited love. It shaped me with its patience, taught me to return after each departure, not to resist the flow of the inevitable. The mountain, a sanctuary of invisible presences, immense, silent, ever-present, watchful, and in its silence it embraces you, shelters you, calms you. There is a memory that unfolds in a spiral, like the sacred geometry of a seashell. Mine is woven from esparto grass that grows at my feet: inherited gestures, resonating silences, fears and resistances that I cannot name, but which I recognize in my essence. My ancestors whisper to me from within, like a vibration that runs through my body and makes me dance. With each movement, I decide on a direction that always leads me to that spiral.

Every cell holds a trace. Bodies that are no longer here inhabit me, but they continue to dance. Their movements manifest themselves as an ancestral choreography that is repeated without being learned, an infinite spiral that is inscribed in every part of my being. In the way I tread the earth, in how I embrace what I do not understand, the cellular memory of my ancestors is revealed. 

The esparto grass becomes a symbol. Braiding it is a form of meditation, a connection to that past that was not told to me, but which is revealed to me through touch. Like the conch shell that holds the sound of the sea, esparto grass holds the whispers of the land. Its fibers, like the threads of my own history, intertwine in silence, evoking the unsaid, what is felt without being known. 

This project is a return. A need to listen to the earth from the body. To invoke those who came before me, not as figures from the past, but as living presences that accompany me in every moment. And it is from here, from this intersection of personal and collective memories, conscious and unconscious, that this project is born: an act of recognition, a spiral back to the foundations. 

This project brings together, among other artistic pieces, a series of digitally manipulated photographs that have their starting point in a performative action. The images, far from being mere records, are reconfigured through digital processes that expand, distort, or rewrite the trace of the action.