UC Riverside

Migration constitutes a cultural and political phenomenon that offers significant attributes to rethink the generalized assumptions about the relationships between territory, identity, memory, gender and race, such as the transversality of classes and ages and the global feminization of migratory movements in the recent decade (Reig and Norum, 2019, Karakoulaki et al, 2018), which visibility is amplified by the creative use that migrants themselves make of digital social networks to share stories about their experiences.My dissertation addresses the migratory phenomenon from an experiential perspective of the trauma-memory paradox, contextualized in the current Venezuelan humanitarian crisis but beyond the polarized discourse that surrounds it. Focusing on recent artistic projects of five Venezuelan women migrant photographers, I address how aesthetic devices contribute to explore, bring to light, and transform in the process the understanding and intelligibility of an experience that exceeds what is understandable to us as experience relatable, and even experienceable. Following a semiotic and cultural studies approach, I analyze the role of the archive, the body, and listening as diasporic chronotope in the photopoetics of Wendy Estrella Yannarella, Freisy González Portales, Fabiola Ferrero, Vilena Figueira, and Diana Rangel Lampe. Through these devices I describe their creative processes and discuss how they challenge the production of meaning in three main axes: the self -representation and migrant experience (Appadurai, 2019; Wille et al, 2015; Schmidt Camacho, 2008; Peeren, 2006); memory-trauma paradox (Caruth, 1995; Hirsch, 2017; Acosta, 2018, 2021); and the crossing of media and languages (Wille and Rekiner, 2015; Kozak, 2014). Through such analysis I show that these artistic projects offer a personal, intimate, aesthetic, and critical approach to the migration, and also create spaces and tools so other migrants or members of communities affected by traumatic experiences can tell their own stories. I argue that these photopoetics of migrant memories open up an interstitial creative space, a permeable threshold to memory, (un)oblivion, and invention (Cardona 2018; de Haene, 2012), as part of personal (although not necessarily individual) intersubjective creation devices, which shows in artistic practices how migrants could use poetry and photography to create collaborative transnational memories.