Lorena Molina

Lives and works in San Francisco, CA

Artist statement

My work is shaped by my experience as a Salvadoran immigrant and by the afterlives of forced migration, colonialism, and imperial violence. I draw from my family’s oral histories, ancestral food practices, and the everyday ecologies that hold both histories of survival and oppression. Through installation, photography, performance, sound, fermentation, textiles, and community engagement, I examine displacement, the politics of visibility, and what it means to return when return is not possible. At the core of my work is an exploration of spatial inequalities and the challenges oppressed groups face in constructing place and belonging. My practice is grounded in a deep sense of displacement after the twelve-year civil war that forced my family and I to immigrate to the US.From this grows a need to build community in ways that are tender, accountable, sustained through difficult conversations that ask all of us to examine our positions and privileges. My work insists on embodiment.I use sensorial elements as methodology that aim to activate memory through smell, taste, humidity, and decay as a way to destabilize the emotional distance institutions often impose on traumatic histories and to foreground the body as a site where geopolitics, migration, and mutual care co-exist. In my recent photographic works, I blur the boundaries between body, image, and environment. In Soy El Clima, I merge landscape and the corporeal by incorporating breath, saliva, and other bodily fluids...

Artwork