i sent my mom's hometown a friend request

MFA Thesis Exhibition by Sarah Alvarez

On view: March 17 - March 28, 2025

Reception: March 21, 5:30 - 7:30pm

Statement:

A home is not a strange place for an archive. From antiquity through modernity, the layers of skin we inhabit – our body, our tools, and our dwellings – have always been inscribed upon by the future-present. My childhood television played digital letters from Cuba in the form of VHS tapes, my relatives’ bodies artifacting between sun-bleached buildings and film grain. A few years later, I would see the same buildings captured in photographs shared by Facebook users “Placetas Villa Clara Cuba” and “Placetas Cuba.” I sent my mom’s hometown a friend request, and practiced embodiment by playing with pixel dolls. i sent my mom’s hometown a friend request meditates on that titular gesture, a yearning that is both aided and thwarted by digital mediation. In my own life, I am a subject of a particular diaspora in which physical distance is compounded by a series of virtual distances: divergent political ideologies, forced poverty and isolation via embargo, and the restriction of the movement of bodies and communications by both Cuba and the US. The only way to circumvent those distances was to enter the virtual; to become a new entry in the grand “new” archive of the Internet. Or, to immigrate once again. In many modern lives, distance has become central. Layers of digital mediation enfold us, siphoning from us time, culture, and labor. Now, artificial intelligence embodies a machinic archive, ingesting information not only to regurgitate it, but to classify it. An automated system of classifications, an undulating index, an archive – these institutions perpetuately isolate, consolidate, and mechanize their records, along with the people captured therein. We make our home in a grand new diaspora of intellectual and cultural production. The works in this show function as a series of vignettes, in which visual e-waste, physical e-waste, home furnishings coagulate into new bodies. These assembled bodies are draped in ceramic, wax, and metal, taking on the roles of bone, skin, and screen, respectively. The human body in digital mediation – through pixel dolls, cursors, and captured media – is a motif that traverses over, under, and in-between assemblages. Herein, the home is an archive; one from which formalized codes emerge only to glitch across space and time, and bodies are best defined by the traces of their passage between the physical and digital.