Ecos

“Ecos” (Spanish for ‘echoes’) is a long-term visual project that explores the relationship between the female body and natural landscapes within a Latin American patriarchal framework. I think of violent experiences inflicted on the body as earthquakes, events that break foundations and leave deep fissures. After a rupture, new paths appear. The terrain changes, and so does the identity shaped by it. Through photography, archive and collage, I work with fragments, traces and memories.

Veins become rivers, wounds become erupting volcanoes, and scars become maps. Paths. I think about the illnesses the women in my family have experienced, those open wounds, the cancer, and where the sacrifice of silence eventually leads. The images hold a certain tension, a feeling that something is about to break.

Just as stones preserve traces of geological history, the human body carries its own marks, scars, and inherited female narratives of resilience, growth, and adaptation.

The echoes are what I hear, what reverberates inside. They connect past and present, making visible what has remained buried and carried. They are the stories, fears, intuitions, and forms of knowledge that have traveled through the women who came before me. I wonder where all these stories settle, where they accumulate, and in which sea they eventually end.

Through different landscapes, I think about my cultural lineage, the knowledge I have inherited, and the memories carried across generations. I cannot speak for the women who came before me. I can only speak from my own experience of finding connections with them, listening to what has been passed down, and understanding how those traces have become part of who I am.

Luciana Merino Coca was selected from among the applicants for “Sisterhood in Practice” exhibition. This Artist Feature is part of Der Greif’s initiative to bring female-identifying and non-binary voices to the forefront.