Archaeology of Birth (2025 - on going) combines the research of a historical and personal archive, speculative reconstruction, and fictional narratives. I seek to reflect on the construction of memory, origin, and the relationship between history, oral storytelling, and imagination.
The project is a work in progress currently being developed as my diploma project for the Master’s in Photography at ÉCAL. At this stage, it comprises a photobook, a single-channel video, and a video installation. The works presented here are stages of the project and form the foundation of the final installation I am developing for the diploma.
I was born in Tacna, a city in southern Peru near the border with Chile. Just 20 kilometres away lies Miculla, a little-known archaeological site in the Atacama Desert. Spanning 22 square kilometres, this valley—once a crossroads for travellers—is home to thousands of petroglyphs etched into its rocks, dating from the 5th to the 15th centuries AD.
Between approximately 1989 and 1993, my mother, Argentinian by birth, held a high-ranking position in the Regional Directorate of Culture of Tacna. During her time there, she worked to strengthen the local community by highlighting the region’s cultural and historical treasures, including unique sites such as Miculla.
A week after I was born, in April 1991, my mother took me to Miculla and baptised me there, offering my life to the universe.
This gesture became, for me, both a family story and a kind of founding myth. Growing up in Buenos Aires from the age of three, I always wondered about my Peruvian origins. Since there is little concrete information about the valley where I was born, I began to understand fiction as a necessary tool: not as something opposed to truth, but as a way of approaching what history, archive, and distance cannot fully explain.
In this project, I return to Miculla through my mother’s photographic archive—the images she captured during her research at the site. These photographs become the foundation for different technical and technological approaches to the desert, allowing me to reconstruct a spiritual feeling of belonging. Through image-making, installation, and mediated forms of reconstruction, I try to build a relationship with a place that is at once real, inherited, and imagined.
This process is important to me because my practice often engages with the unknown—spirituality, magic, the supernatural, all that we may feel to be true but cannot fully prove through logic. I am interested in how technical images can hold these fragile dimensions, and in how technology can be used not only to document, but also to reactivate memory, tenderness, and forms of emotional knowledge.
Archaeology of Birth is also a way of asking how an origin can be reconstructed when it is fragmented, distant, and mediated through other people’s stories and images. I try to destabilise fixed ideas of truth and open a space where memory and imagination can remain porous, affective, and alive. This work is my attempt to reconnect with a place that I barely knew, but that somehow continues to shape me. It is a search for belonging through images, and for a spiritual and emotional connection to an origin—ancestral and contemporary—that can perhaps only be reached through this fictional-affective strategy of reconstruction.
The installation for the diploma aims to give agency to the elements of the desert and to place the viewer in that landscape. There are three elements that compose the work. The first element consists of the petroglyph-rocks that belong to the archaeological site; the images of them were extracted from my mother’s photos. They are UV printed on aluminium, cut by hand, and each one is connected to a sound transducer. They vibrate with the sound of an earthquake. Miculla is in the Andes; the mountains there are still moving, and the earth trembles quite often.
The second element is the landscape panorama. Using the same materiality and process as the rocks, I am building this panoramic view of the Andes mountains, playing the role of a semi-circular screen of 600 × 300 cm. The image contains and surrounds the trembling rocks and the viewers and also holds the projection of the video. The third and last element is the audiovisual, in which I try to give life to the imagination of the people, the travellers who walked through the desert and engraved the rocks.
Each element brings a different layer to reconstruct the desert and a possible approaching to the energy/spirituality of this remembered (or dreamed) landscape.