SOCIAL  ORGANS

What happens when you are grown inside an inestable household? What happens when two of your childhood friends commit suicide, Miguel because suffering from depression and Alesandro from schizophrenia? What happens to your psyche when you move to a different country, twice? What happens when your parents die when you are young? What kind of support makes me/us keep going and copying with our traumas and personal situations?

And still with all this pain and fear in my heart, I decided to paint what I most appreciate. The support I received.

The series Social Organs tries to answer these questions, organize, structure it, and classify moments I spent with family and friends. It reveals my life, painted and framed, privacy and trust, and makes it transparent, like the absence of walls on the canvas.

This project is expanding the reasearch about the community support in different communities, with a pilot project starting in 2025 in the South side of Columbus, Ohio.

This idea of organizing moments by creating paintings of it, instead of just keeping pictures was inspired by paintings made by other artists: e.g. La Mesa 1980 by Antonio lopez-Garcia, Le Diner 1869 by Monet, or Self-Portrait with Blue Guitar 1977 by David Hockney.

The name Social Organs was taken from a conversation of Krista Tippett with Janine Benyus and Azita Ardakani on the On Being podcast.