Sucúa Haven
(work in progress)
Sucúa Haven, May 2023.
Súcua Haven is an interdisciplinary project that lives in the border between fiction and nonfiction and between art and anthropology. Sucúa Haven is in the US but it's also Ecuador. It co-exist in an area called Greater New Haven in the state of Connecticut.
It describes experiences, memories and dreams of a migrant community predominantly of Ecuadorians. It questions ideas of belonging, identity and transmigration.
The project combines different mediums as photography (documentary and staged), writting, and autobiographical performative practices.
The stories are told in four different chapters. These overlap but share different insights creating a portrait of this meta space: Sucúa Haven.
Free Photography: The artist offers herself to document the community´s weddings, baptism, birthday parties. This works as a autobiographical performative practice use first, as a way to get to know people, a way to give a service back and also to become the “social photographer” in the story.
Chapter 2 & 3
Visual Anthropology exercises
2. Through interviews, the artist collaborates with the people of the community to stage photographs of their memories, fears and dreams. Through the process she learns more about their migration experience and how they have reconstructed a life and community in Sucúa Haven, the place they now call home. As well as their relationship with the homeland, Ecuador.
3. Self identification portraits: These exercise reflects on people´s identities and how they negotiate and inhabit different ethnic, racial, national, gender, occupational categories.
Chapter 4
Through instax photographs, the artist opens up her diary to share the experiences she had in Súcua Haven. Now, not only as an anthropologist or an artist but as an individual that finds herself being transformed by the place and its people.