I Forbid You to Forget Me is a series of family archival photos appropriated into collage work to focus on the loss of my mother, Maggie. The series began out of urgency, to create a place for my grief to live. While sorting through the things my mother left behind, I found a photo I had never seen before. A small portrait of my mom framed within a heart, underneath the portrait, in her handwriting, was the phrase “Te prohibo que me olvides”. It translates to I Forbid You to Forget Me.

The series investigates two contradictory urges: the archival urge to reflect upon the past and the conceptualist urge to bend the process of reflection toward the practice of contemplating. The collage method is intended to create artwork outside of the digital space, tangible pieces that mirror the physicality of grief. Almost all of the materials used within the series are sourced from my family archive and implemented in a variety of processes, including embroidered phrases on family photographs, pairing portraits of Maggie with items she left behind, and transferring images onto fabric.