Overly Past

EDITION

2025, Shortlisted

school

School of Photography and Visual Media, Mexico

links

@andreadmarco ↗

This project is a love letter to my childhood and an intimate act of resistance against forgetting. As an artist who migrated from Venezuela to Mexico, I chose to reconstruct fragmented memories and emotions, shaped by migration, familial distance, and inherited silences, through self-portraits, intervened archival material, and art direction. I fabricate imagined moments I did not live, those that happened before I was born or after I migrated. My work is a reflection on the sorrow caused by the physical absence of my mother and the geographical distance from my father. It is also shaped by Venezuela’s sociopolitical context. From this vulnerability as a migrant in Mexico, I find in my memories a visual language to embrace the past and uncover the resilience of the present. Each image is a reconciliation with the different versions of myself separated by physical and emotional borders. I claim the right to remember, to feel, and to cry; I dignify my roots and rebuild myself with them, without needing to reopen wounds in order to remember. Overly past is a phrase I once heard as a warning, but for me, it is a source of support. It is the substance that serves as scaffolding to build the present upon the foundations of who I was and who I continue to be. These images are both an act of resistance and an emotional reflection against forgetting, as well as a testament to the power of memory, even fictionalized, as a space of freedom, repair, and belonging.