Diffuse borders. (Low res. extract) 
Multilayer monochanel HD video loop (5:00")

 

More than a decade ago I learned, by chance, that one of my paternal great-grandmothers had belonged to a native people of Venezuela. The Timote people, of Andean Indians. Years later, when I finally had the opportunity, I had a DNA test to confirm if this news was true. To my great surprise, not only did I find that my great-grandmother had indeed belonged to one of these groups, but I discovered that my DNA contains genetic information from at least 21 different groups from all over the planet. My genome has my ancestors from the Americas (13%), Africa (8%), Europe (67%), Asia (2.5%) and the Middle East (3.3%) well represented. I am the sum of millions of very diverse people, something very common in our vast continent, because Latin America is a great melting pot, in which countless native cultures have mixed with European, Asian and African cultures, becoming a gigantic tree with thousands of branches and roots. For centuries, our ancestors have met and shared their heritage, forming a human landscape of undefined limits, with a single heart that pumps our mixed blood.

 

The Kogui of Colombia, the older brothers, say that the Universe is a great loom, and that to live is to weave. Abia Yala is a great fabric in which the genes, beliefs, cuisine, music, languages, knowledge and loves of our ancestors are interwoven like threads.

 

But, in reality, the whole of humanity is a changing mosaic, the product of an incessant journey of hundreds of thousands of years. It is said that Homo sapiens emerged somewhere in East Africa, some 300,000 years ago, and that, since then, its expansion began, until it conquered every corner of the planet. Therefore, all of us who live outside East Africa are descendants of migrants.

 

This work is constructed from the superimposed portraits of people originating from the 21 sites detected in my DNA, generating a tapestry of diffuse borders, like our own. More than a portrait of me, or of my ancestors, it is a tribute to all people descended from migrants. In other words, it is a tribute to all the people who make up the great tapestry of humanity, in which borders are only a fiction.