El archivo de la inocencia

Master's Thesis

Paula Mateu

 MPhD 24

Recognize yourself in other people’s albums, and see your memories through theirs, and you through them.

About family, the one given to you without option or choice:

I grew up happy in an unhappy family, shaped by social guidelines, by having rather than by wanting.

When my mother decided to start a new path in search of a different family reality and my father was left alone at home I began to question everything I had been taught until then. The life that had been promised to me disappeared, and I began to explore isolation. In that ideological void between stages, I could not find any comfort to hold on to imagine the new life that awaited me. I questioned all the choices my parents made that had brought us to that place.

Through time and adaptation under the influences of these new family dynamics, hope began to emerge for a new path for the family. A different family, a chosen one.

This story does not work with a beginning, a middle, and an end, because it is an echo of life itself, a chaotic and emotional archive that is born as a reflection of a crisis. I put my eye and my perspective, but the story is not only mine, even if I reconstruct it as I want.

This project was born out of a need, a need to generate my story, to understand it, to know where I come from in order to continue as a daughter, as a woman, as an artist, and now as an author. To talk about what is not talked about with those I always talk, and to teach my parents how I see and understand family.