TRACES: STORIES OF MIGRATION
I’m JC, London-based Visual Artist, and this piece is my response to “Traces: Stories of Migration”, a project by Making For Change at the London College of Fashion that explores personal stories of migration across multiple generations told through handcrafted textiles. The programme took me down a journey of discovering my identity, tracing back my migration journey and the journeys of my family and my ancestors. The artwork that I created tried to answer the question of why was I born in Panama and not in Catalonia. However, after researching where my parents come from, and where their parents came from, and where the parents of the parents of my parents came from, I ended up pondering upon the notion that nobody is from anywhere and that we are all from somewhere else.
I produced this piece using an alternative photographic process called Cyanotype, which I applied to fabric, creating a collage of images of my migration journey and the migration journeys of my family. The piece consists of layers of sheer fabric, each layer representing one migration journey in my family (my mom’s side, my dad’s side, my own). The images in all the layers are arranged and cropped so that when they are all placed one on top of the other you can see the silhouette of my face. The artwork tries to convey that we are the sum of the migration journeys of our families and it is inspired by the pages of notebooks that I brought with me when I left my country, which when seen from the side look like layers.
My family journey is very layered, so I wanted to use a fabric that I could layer up and would allow me to see the lower layers below. I chose silk organza because it’s an organic fabric and I chose cyanotype to print the images on the fabric because it’s an organic process and it’s environmentally friendly.
I soaked all the layers of the fabric in the cyanotype solution and let them dry overnight in a dark place. In the meantime, I created digital collages with photos that belong to each of my family migration journeys and printed one digital negative per layer. When the fabric was dry, I exposed the digital negative on the fabric using a UV light. Then I washed the fabric layers in running water and let them air dry the whole night. Once dry, the lovely people at Making For Change helped me finish the seam to protect the fabric from fraying.
There are five layers of fabric with images printed on them, each layer describing a different migration journey in my family. The first layer is my mom’s side of the family, who came to Panama from Catalonia travelling via Brazil after World War II. The second layer is my own journey starting in the year 2000, from Panama to the UK and travelling via Catalonia, the US, France and Australia. The third layer is my dad’s side of the family, who came to Panama from Northern Spain in the 18th century. The fourth layer has images of the different pages of the notebooks: one notebook with poems that I wrote when I was a teenager in Panama, one journal, one phonebook and one recipe notebook where I have my grandmother’s recipes. The last layer is a composite of the other four.
The cyanotype technique results in a deep blue colour called Prussian Blue. To me, the blue represents the oceans that we had to cross during our journeys. The journeys are embroidered in the fabric with red thread, because it’s the colour that the Catalan flag, the Panamanian flag and the UK Union Flag have in common.
The pieces from all the participants in the programme were inspired by the maker’s heritage, reflecting and embodying their experiences and memories. All the artworks were exhibited at Making Space Gallery in Poplar’s Aberfeldy Street in November 2021. The black fabric that can be seen over my artwork in the gallery images is an exhibition addition to cover symbols associated with war crimes that although offensive, are a devastating and integral part of my family’s history.
“Traces: Stories of Migration” was a great opportunity to engage in conversations about migration and to change perceptions about immigration, particularly now with the refugee crisis, because even families who can trace back their family trees for centuries within the same country can find that at some point there is a migration journey in their own homes. The programme has given me a renewed sense of pride in calling myself an immigrant, who's the son of immigrants, the grandson of immigrants, and the heir of all these migration stories.
Making For Change is a programme for social engagement at the London College of Fashion that aims to collaborate with communities and creatives to disrupt exclusionary fashion systems. It is an ongoing collaboration with artist Professor Lucy Orta from the Centre for Sustainable Fashion.