"Some of my ancestors are included in the statistics related to the slave trade, that shameful process in which millions of human beings were trafficked and deprived of any connection to their environment of origin. The first step was to change their names. That brief exchange was the catalyst that led me to begin working on Sweet Thing, a multidisciplinary attempt to reconstruct an uncertain past where I use sugar as a symbolic motif by adding it to a fragmented family album from what remains."
"I still remember that narrow ribbon of earth winding down from my grandfather's house towards the old Triunvirato plantation the same fields where an enslaved woman called Carlota, who led an uprising in 1843, raised her voice against chains. In the silence of that road, it feels like a place that has been frozen in time 1/ Colonial records suggest an annual death rate of about 5% among the enslaved population in Cuba's sugar plantations,"
Generational disconnection from origins results from the transatlantic slave trade, which trafficked millions and erased names, places, and family ties. A multidisciplinary project titled Sweet Thing reconstructs an uncertain past by using sugar as a symbolic motif woven into a fragmented family album. The work combines archival photographs, contemporary images from visits to parental birthplaces, and conceptual self-portraits. Memories of a road from a grandfather's house to the Triunvirato plantation evoke the uprising led by Carlota in 1843. Colonial records indicate high mortality among enslaved people on Cuban sugar plantations, including large numbers of deaths during transit.
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