Sorry, I’m not from here either

For hundreds of thousands of years, we have travelled long distances and, if we look closely, we are still doing so today. Barely ten years ago, Homo sapiens was thought to be around 200,000 years old; today we know that our history goes back at least 300,000 years and that human populations moved for millennia between different territories in Africa before spreading to other continents. Permanent settlements came much later, but mobility never disappeared: when life demands it, we keep looking for another place where we can live it.

The reasons for this mobility are countless. Migration has taken place in every era, sometimes in quite remarkable forms: predominantly male migrations, such as those linked to Roman military expansion; migrations of young women alone, such as the Filles du Roi or Operation Marta, which moved unmarried women from France to Canada and from Galicia and the Basque Country to Australia, respectively; colonisation policies based on family migration, such as those implemented by Catherine the Great, which moved entire families from Germany to Russia; and so many others: seasonal, rural, urban or transcontinental migrations. We also move as entire peoples, voluntarily or by force. Sometimes a signal from the Inca in Peru or a decision by the Politburo in the Soviet Union was enough to displace whole ethnic groups from one end of the continent to the other.

The complexity of human mobility is as vast as human experience itself.

As a migrant from Moldova to Spain, I experience this subject first-hand. Yet, when exploring individual stories, a question inevitably arises: is there anyone who can claim not to be a migrant or descended from migrants? I was born in Chișinău, but my parents had already migrated from the countryside to the city.

We speak of mobility, but how many stories are we talking about? How many hopes of moving forward, of improving one's circumstances or simply surviving? Of risking everything, even one's own life, in exchange for leaving. And, like life itself, these stories contain everything: uncertainty, fear, happiness, unease, fulfilment, desire, humour… and so many, many other things. There is also something of the hero's journey in the figure of the migrant: loss, trials, adaptation and, sometimes, return. Migration often involves a journey that is not only physical but also psychological, in which a person must go through extraordinary situations to have an ordinary life. The psychologist Joseba Achotegui calls the set of grieving processes associated with this experience Ulysses syndrome.

This project approaches mobility through the multiplicity that defines it, because there are so many layers, so many ways of moving, so many stories. It also begins with a very simple wish: to share the experience of migration with others who have lived it; simply to listen to what other people have to say who, like me, at some point left, crossing countries with their children, alone, or however they could.

I listen to their stories, and they are mine too, because I too could have been Émilie or Aicha.

That is why this is a project of many, many layers. There is audiovisual work, there is painting, there is reading and writing, there are multiple languages.

I use the coin as a visual and symbolic device because it is an object whose value resides in the collective system that sustains it. A coin circulates, changes hands and carries an implicit question that runs through the whole project: how we construct the value of things and, by extension, the value we assign to people.

And I use the face of the coin because it lets me give a face to the people who are part of a phenomenon that can only be rejected from the emotional distance made possible by rendering them anonymous. The profile portrait evokes the numismatic tradition and the figures who have historically been granted the privilege of occupying that space of representation. Ricardo Falcinelli also speaks of the profile as the position of a narrative character: someone who is seen but is unaware of being seen, immersed in the story, without establishing with the viewer the direct dialogue created by a frontal view.

In my coins, it is precisely ordinary people who occupy that place, each with their own story.

Arranged in panels, repetition creates an initial reading based on colour and rhythm. From a distance, the faces can merge into a pattern; on coming closer, something else appears: time, the care with which I have approached each piece, its singularity; rather like finding a person in a crowd, when it is only by getting to know them that a connection becomes possible.

Ultimately, I am interested in the tension between the individual and the collective: just as an isolated coin has limited value and it is their accumulation that creates it, each portrait forms part of a larger structure. That accumulation allows me to speak of community: a collection of different lives that, appearing alongside one another, acquire a choral dimension.

I end these words by returning to my own life, remembering (passing through the heart again, as Galeano puts it) Lia-Ciocârlia, the choir that, when I was a girl, distracted me from the hardships of a collapsing system and, in exchange, filled my little head with things like music, art and culture.

Of those girls who sang together, I know that today one lives in Belgium, others in Switzerland, Italy or Spain, as I do.

Looking at the portraits and listening to the voices in this installation, I recognise something of that experience of belonging to a choir. Each voice had its place among the others.

Perhaps that is why, when I work with these multitudes, I never feel that I am looking at them from the outside. And that is what I want to do with this installation: seek the harmony that connects all these individual stories and invite visitors to seek the music, accompany it and identify their own voice as another part of the whole.