Esquejes Alba [Alba Cuttings] (2021)
Digital print on paper
40 × 60 × 2 cm (framed)
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2021.505.1
Esquejes Alba [Alba Cuttings] is a work that is part of the ‘Desplazamientos latinoamericanos’ [‘Latin-American Displacements’] series (2019-2023), which emerged from the time spent at European botanical gardens, spaces dedicated to exhibiting, conserving, classifying and extracting the flora for medical and commercial purposes. Many of the physical specimens of those archives were obtained by European scientific expeditions from the 17th to 19th centuries to Abya Yala (The Americas) and other conquered territories.
The work is based on the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid, where flora and migrants originally from Latin America mutually recognised each other. Each participant narrates their experience, shares photographs of their displacements and identifies with a plant from their native land, seeking to establish collaborative and horizontal self-representation.
‘Cuttings are parts of plants taken from their place of origin in order to establish roots in other territories; my intention with ‘Cuttings’ is to reflect on why flora and migrants are in Madrid, qualify the different forms of migration, and let that reality be viewed away from otherness.’
— Georgina Rodríguez
The personal archive photographs were produced using pre-photographic processes, such as cyanotype, anthotype and chlorophyll, where light and exposure time change the capturing of the image in a similar way to a memory.
Georgina’s artistic research focuses on transforming the identity through historical, economic and social processes, addressing issues such as colonialism and globalisation from a decolonial feminist perspective. She currently lives in Madrid, where she explores the link between the image and textile by experimenting with manual techniques and materials.