Making a House

Baragiotta was chosen by our Community Manager and Program Curator to participate in one of our Face-to-Face portfolio feedback sessions with our Guest Room Curator Jo. Trujillo Argüelles.

I grew up in an environment where interior design and architecture magazines transformed the places I lived in, but my family did not have a house of their own. As we constantly moved, embracing a home, adapting to its spaces, its textures and colors, became a process that I had to repeat more often than I expected. We were constantly faced with having to build a home, aspiring to the illusion of stability that these catalogs presented.

In “Hacer una casa” (Making a House) I explore my family archive to explore this tension. Using collage, silkscreen prints, and digital cut-outs, I compare photographs that my family took in the homes that we built together with images found in magazines, highlighting where reality tries to match what is understood as the “ideal house”. The decorative gestures try to resemble these imaginaries, but some moments of untidiness, effect of authentic dwelling, disrupt the pristine and artificial sensation of advertising imagery, generating a dialogue revealing how the act of inhabiting resists perfection.

This research naturally led me to contemplate ruins of dwellings: homes once full of life, now reduced to their structures, and to capture the silent eloquence of the vestiges of what were once family homes. Shaped by a life without a permanent home, I find in these fragments a mirror, understanding the skeletons of these abandoned structures as containers for absent memories. I reflect on the ephemeral and rooted, contrasting the transience I experience with the permanence implicit in the idea of ​​home, and explore the poetics of forgotten spaces and the traces that existence leaves in the places we inhabit.

The project moves between construction and erosion, permanence and impermanence, memory and longing. Ultimately, it questions how the idea of home is formed: through objects, gestures, absences, and how, over time, these fragments come together to tell a story of completeness.

"Talking to Jo Trujillo Argüelles was an enriching experience that helped me see my practice from a new perspective. Our conversation opened up the possibility of combining different approaches to create a more layered and meaningful narrative. Her feedback helped me recognize the strengths of my current direction while also challenging me to think more critically about form and intention."

- Alessandra's testimonial on her “Face-to-Face” Session