Abrazos RompeHuesos

Andrea Carvajal

January 28, 2020 @ 6:32PM

It is the small things that slip away in the midnight of your brain that really show just how affected you are by what has happened.

Of course, you have your loud moments. But when it has been a while and those loud moments don’t happen so often, we get too comfortable. We forget and invalidate the small significant things that in turn has us brushing off our shoulders of the mildew and grime that still reside on them.

January 10, 2020 at 11:54AM

A while ago I threw myself onto the kitchen floor. I don’t remember the step by step. There was just me standing and then just me spread eagle on the cool tile floor. When I remember it, tunnel vision shows me just me in the room. But if memory serves correct, in those black edges, lived everything and everyone else that was actually in the room with me.

When I remember that, I can see myself from different angles. And the scenes play out of order in a sort of cacophony of images. Memories are weird because they’re wrong.

I know exactly, almost exactly, what happened and yet the emotions get intertwined and interpreted in the actual happenings. They get smeared.

Photographing my family and spending time with them was therapeutic as I flushed all the racing thoughts onto the camera. In the beginning, the photographs were heavy with emotion and weighty with a reluctant approach. And, well, that was a given; I looked towards photography to try to understand the emotions as I painted, splattered them into each frame. There was a lot of hurt in the beginning. Now, not so much. I have untangled myself. I have given myself the necessary time to take knot after knot into curious hands, finding open eyes searching through the tangles. I’ve taken each strand connected to my brother, my best friend, my mother and my father as well as myself and held each one closer, looking at the frayed ends. I know they hold theirs. I know my brother has found his. He mends it, retying where it has been worn thin and split. I know he stares in awe of it. He holds it closer with each passing day. Tightly now, making sure to not let go again.

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