External Memories is a research and archival project centered on the reconstruction of migrants’ digital memory. It emerges from the urgency to preserve memories that, throughout displacement, are lost or erased under multiple forms of violence and the absence of spaces in which they can endure. Limited access to storage devices and technological infrastructures contributes to their disappearance, pushing these narratives toward oblivion. Since 2021, I have explored this archaeological practice of recovering and restoring obsolete storage devices—SD cards, hard drives, and external memories sourced from flea markets and second-hand spaces. These devices contain fragments of life, often recorded on early-2000s mobile phones (Nokia, Alcatel, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, BlackBerry), with only a few megabytes of storage, where images and documents have remained latent for over a decade.

The recovered material forms a living archive, External Memory Archive, which resists classification and hierarchy. It is configured as an open space that embraces loss, error, and interruption as inherent conditions of these images. Its assemblage brings together lives that do not know each other, yet share a common condition of displacement and a shared fragility in their preservation. Beneath dominant media narratives and official historical accounts, these memories flow under the weight of institutionalized storytelling. They are records conceived within intimacy that, upon resurfacing, unfold an affective density: celebrations, silences, gestures of love and sorrow, bodies approaching the camera with familiarity. Fragments of home that cross physical and symbolic borders, revealing an everyday dimension that escapes hegemonic frameworks of representation.

External Memories proposes a re-reading of migratory narratives through documents generated by migrants themselves, shifting the point of view. In this context, photography is approached critically: its historical role in producing violent imaginaries about the Global South is acknowledged, while it is also activated as a tool for restitution. The project thus proposes an exercise of de-appropriation and rewriting, in which enunciation shifts toward those who have traditionally been objects of representation. From this position, a space opens where images do not illustrate an imposed narrative, but rather tension it, guide it, and reconfigure it from within—from the body itself and its agency.

External Memories, 2024

Print on white polyester backlit in a light box (LED, 44W). Memory file recovered from acquired and found mobile devices.

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This work has been exhibited in various venues, both individually and collectively. It was part of the exhibition * La Sagrada Familia is still Under Construction *, curated by Kaushal Sapre, Nikki Nita Ramírez, and Phokeng Setai, and organized by the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation at the Ateneo de Madrid. It was also presented at the Freijó Gallery as part of the exhibition *Appropriations and Memories *, curated by Ramón Mateos, alongside the work of Joan Fontcuberta. Additionally, it was exhibited individually at La Parcería, curated by Fabio Manosalva .