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How This Has To Be Told




From How This Has To Be Told at the ICP-Bard Studio Gallery



Year: 2016
Duration: 43 minutes
Medium: 35mm slides synched to soundtrack and digital projection.
Language: Audio in English and Spanish with English subtitles.


Where will my family pictures end up?

Home movies and family photographs are interesting because of how much significance they carry when they picture your own history and how little they do when they depict someone else’s. It is as if they could be the most meaningful and the most meaningless at the same time. Why do we take family pictures? To help us remember? As evidence that we were once somewhere doing something with someone? Why can’t our family pictures just be images? Why do we burden them with so much responsibility?

I remember when after a trip, my family would gather around a stack of pictures and flip through them passing them from person to person; or when a family member would invite us over for a carrousel viewing of an event; or when someone would bring out an album as a mean of reminisce. I am interested in this communal spaces created by family pictures. I like to explore not only the moment when they were taken but the moment they create when people experience them.

The piece consists of a 35mm slideshow synched to sound. The 29 slides have each a narration. The accumulation of these voices questions the content of the pictures and further talks about how we use family pictures and their relationship to truth.




Exhibitions and Screenings

  • The Stench of Orange Blossoms: How This Has To Be Told, screening, 2023, Miriam Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
  • Any Time Soon, solo show, 2020, curated by Verónica Puche, Notas al Futuro
  • Re: Frame, 2017, curated by Jane Cavalier and Nicole Kaack, Re: Art Show, Brooklyn, NY
  • How This Has to Be Told, 2017, screening, Point Green Studio, Brooklyn, NY
  • How This Has to Be Told, 2016, ICP-Bard MFA Studios, International Center of Photography, Queens, NY
  • Reflections on Spring: an Online Exhibition in 3 Parts, 2020, online exhibition, Top Cat Gallery
  • The Ties that Bind, Curated by Charlotte Cotton, Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York, New York, NY
  • NYSOUNDCIRCUIT 8.2: How this has to be told, 2021, NYSoundCircuit online