Displaced project

Displaced is my exploration of media-enhanced installations as a tool to present social content in a compelling and immersive way. 
The goal was to persuade my audience to relate to and understand the experience of those who have left their homes to escape political conflicts. 

I presented this installation at the ITP Spring show in 2004 in NYC

I used this project to identify a much more personal concentration, the exploration of media as a tool for creating social awareness; to produce art that will bring attention to important issues in a narrative, experimental, educational and visual way.

Lariza migrated from Nicaragua in the late 1980’s as a teenager.  This particular story has many layers of complexity since her mother, an adamant supporter of the Nicaraguan revolution forced Lariza to leave Nicaragua in order to prevent her from joining the Sandinista Revolutionary Army at the age seventeen, because she feared for her life.  

Lariza’s story presents her internal conflicts with the duality of her ethnic heritage, her acquired biculturalism and the emotional and psychological turmoil she went through before coming to terms with her reality.  Most importantly, this story has a lot to do with how Lariza’s ideological conflicts are tied to her conflicts with her mother.  “The revolution made us and broke us at the same time”, a quote from Lariza’s interview.  

Lariza did not come to this country under asylum immigration status. She is an American citizen.  I chose to present her narration because it a story of forced migration and it reveals the close relationship between ideology, identity, and family and how war, economics, principles and foreign intervention define the course human lives.