Matrilineal is a multimedia project that honors the women in my family that came before me. It is inspired by the recent loss of my manina, my mother’s mother who disliked being called abuela because it made her feel old. This project explores the lessons that our mothers teach us explicitly and, more importantly, through their actions.
The narration is an elegy to what my manina taught my mother and what my mother has taught me. It is also an exploration of the generational values that my manina’s mother couldn’t teach her directly because she passed when my manina was only five years old. These values were left to my manina’s elder siblings, leaving the task of imparting these teachings to the eldest daughter, who became the mother they had lost and illuminated their upbringing with strength and compassion.
My manina’s funeral was a solemn occasion that brought together her children, her nieces and nephews, and her grandkids. Beyond an opportunity to mourn collectively the loss of a central figure in our family, it became a forum for stories of her life, her jokes, and her tenderness. It reinforced the lessons of love, kindness, and solidarity that she taught her children as her legacy on this terrestrial plane. These lessons of love have influenced every decision made in my family—from choosing to bring my uncle’s ashes to his birth city to meticulously decorating her grave with the flowers from her funeral.
As an antithesis to generational trauma, Matrilineal explores generational virtue. In Matrilineal, I consider her legacy by reminiscing with my mother about the generational lessons that have shaped our lives and informed the values that we embody and project onto the communities that surround us.
Through the use of Artificial Intelligence, photographs collected through archival research are brought to life in this piece to animate the faces and bodies of deceased family members. AI provides the opportunity to consider the echoes of life that continue to exist in our memories after someone's passing. The speectres that live in my memory are animated through AI to create a compelling narrative that reinforces the generational virtue as explored in the piece.