The Orphan Garden (ongoing)
Visual essay ca. 40 minWork in Progress
2025
El jardín huérfano (The Orphan Garden) is an ongoing visual essay that forms part of a broader artistic research project on memory, migration, and family archives.
The work began with the chance discovery of an orphaned archive at a flea market in Leipzig: a box containing photographs, letters, and documents from a German family named Müller. Through a process of poetic activation, autoethnographic writing, and visual storytelling, the archive became a point of departure to reflect on questions of belonging, postcustodial care, and the construction of memory across borders.
This project is both a film and a research inquiry. It explores how personal and collective histories are shaped through gaps, silences, and acts of care. By juxtaposing the Müller archive with fragments from my own family’s migration story between Peru and Germany, El jardín huérfano weaves a layered narrative about what it means to care for someone else’s memory and to narrate through what is missing.
The film is currently a work in progress, shown in different formats as part of my master’s studies in Art in Context at the Universität der Künste Berlin.