Mining for Some Sort of Continuity, 2023-2024
Image transfers onto corrugated metal, fragmented glass,

corroded steel and copper plates

This series focuses on the fragmentation that occurs within the personal, social and cultural identity of those living in exile. Central to this exploration is the fleeting nature of memories, whether stored in objects like photographs or in the mind, and how they construct a mobile, personal, and ephemeral archive that is fundamental to the construction of diasporic identities.

Appropriating archival family photographs becomes a poignant commentary on immigration and self-reinvention - challenging the notion of ownership over memories that are not one’s own. Through the process of an image transfer, an alternative reality is constructed in line with Alberto Manguel’s concept of the artist in exile, whose faithful memory betrays their country’s current reality such that “the exile sees the country as it never is... everything he does is colored by something half-remembered... it is a country drawn from memory, from things half-known or half-dreamt.”

Fragmentation is a recurring visual motif throughout the series – evoking the puzzle-like way a diasporic identity is constructed. So too within the series, a single memory is literally split across several corrugated steel panels, or various copper plates, just as a lone glass shard recalls the moment it splintered from a larger whole.

Akin to immigration, to transfer an image is to displace it from its original source. A transfer is an almost identical version of the original, yet it cannot hide the fundamental changes it endured. The transfer is an eidetic image - remembered with accuracy and clarity, but subject to distortions. It is a mirrored reflection that has traded vibrancy and detail for textures and uniqueness. Traces of its journey are left visible through the scratches, rips and distortions produced through its translation and displacement.

Ernesto Cabral de Luna practices the deconstruction of familial memories alongside the production of his own. Making sense of his family’s movement across borders from Mexico to Canada as an exile, Cabral de Luna constructs works that combine transfers of archived family photos with various scrap materials. In his study of his own intergenerational memory, the artist interrogates the fragmentary nature of his family’s histories that he holds on to, as well as the informal vernacular of architecture that is constructed in Global South countries post-colonization. Cabral de Luna contemplates architecture as a physical translation of his relationship to shaping and preserving his cultural identity beyond the borders of his native home - haphazard and self-determined. In his explorations with corrugated metal and broken glass, Cabral de Luna examines the political implications of his family’s migration, and the materials’ synonymousness with adaptation, impermanence, poverty, and ad hoc measures of securitization. Intermixed with his own photos taken on a recent visit to Mexico, Cabral de Luna’s work negotiates his agency in his remembrance, and the legitimacy of his relationship to not only his family’s ties, but his national identity existing in two worlds simultaneously.