When the memory turns to dust emerges from my engagement with domestic photographic archives acquired from different individuals: family images, travel and vacation photographs, dedications and sweet notes that together from the affective materiality of a past that does not belong to me, yet which I reactive through my practice. I preserve their photographic essence by working with layers of original photographic paper — remnants, cuts, deterioration, and fragments from diverse origins — that enter into dialogue with one another to construct new visual associations. I am interested in allowing blurs, stains, tears, scratches, and technical flaws to remain visible rather than concealed, so that they become narrative agents revealing that passage of time and the fragility of memory.

All the collages maintain a small format, in keeping with the intimate scale of family photography and with the close, almost tactile relationship these documents originally had.

My process involves dismantling, classifying, and manually recomposing these vestiges with an ethic of care toward the intimate, while simultaneously incorporating a fictional component that displaces a purely documentary reading and opens up new possibilities of interpretation.

These photocollages transform vernacular photography — never intended to be art — into a space of multiple narratives, where personal memory intertwines with social tensions and affects that, although rooted in my own context, achieve a universal resonance. In each work, different temporalities coexist: the past inscribed in the image, the future completed by the viewer.

In this way, the recovered fragments become an expanded territory in which to reflect on identity, belonging, and the fragility of what we remember, allowing what was once destined to fade away to be reborn as a new form of visual storytelling.

Ricardo Miguel Hernández