Gabriela Zevallos Egg explores an identity story through family portraits.
The historical documents let us know that a ship with a group of Tyrolean travelers under the leadership of Father Egg in the mid-19th century went to the land of Peru in search of a better life.
“… Ah, goodbye dear ones,
Say goodbye to Tyrol
Have a good trip and may happiness receive you in the distance,
Goodbye, children of Tyrol, goodbye.
And if you climb to the top of the Andes,
You see below forests, fields and rivers
Of the most vivid colors,
And above the celestial sapphire vault.
Friends, remember the giant crests
Of the Retia, covered with ice and snow.
And remember the green of the meadows and fir trees,
Where once was your homeland… .. ”
“Farewell to the Tyrolean emigrants” J. Flitzer
Where do the stories begin? Not always in the same place.
Will this start in the port of Antwerp that March 30, 1857 when the Norton cargo ship will raise sails and lift anchors to begin the three months of navigation to Peruvian coast?
Will it begin with the promise of the Peruvian government to give land to European migrants in exchange for technical labor, due to the economic boom from the extraction of guano and minerals?
Will it take place in the unsatisfied promises of the Peruvian government or in the pride that generated overcoming these lands choked in the jungle and create the Tyrol of the Andes.
Perhaps it begins in the memory of a happy childhood full of dreams fulfilled. Or in the forced escape in the 1980s by the invasion of terrorist groups?
Where do the stories begin? Not always in the same place.
Almost three decades had to pass for the return ...
The clothes are re-sewn as an attempt to recreate the memory. Something is still hanging from time, as in that clock of the Palmatambo house, the past does not reside in the past.
The work is a fabric of connections with indefinite edges between the other and the own, that are arming in their plot a longing for that which no longer has a place, except in these photographs that allow themselves to say that which words cannot express.
