Tributo a un perro libre is a two-channel, two-voice, 5 minute audiovisual installation, narrating the life stories of an immigrant mother and daughter. In their first person accounts, the figures capture the impact of navigating coming of age while living with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). All together, the piece is an audiovisual journey of the dynamic interplay between inheritance, family, mental struggles, and resilience.
One channel centers on the mother’s life, presented in digital camcorder to narrate her journey from birth to her experience as a single mother navigating survival in an underdeveloped country to her diagnosis late in life, within a system often unfamiliar and hostile. The other channel, digitally animated, delves playfully and abstractedly into the daughter’s internal world, how she processes her mother’s struggles while navigating her own. Both narratives are bounded by an inherited desire to dream big and the resilience to push against societal stigma and personal limitations.
The installation becomes an experimental dialogue between two temporalities (evoked through medium), two visual languages, and two voices that, repeatedly through time, mirror and diverge. While the mother’s filmic narrative is grounded in textured realism, the daughter’s animation introduces symbolic, emotional and playful abstraction.
ABOUT+
Laura Caraballo is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bogotá and based in Tiohtià:ke [Montréal]. Her work explores the use of technology to reimagine and create interactive, sensorial physical and virtual spaces that represent and engage communities in meaningful conversations. She is particularly interested in examining how we shape, and are shaped by, the spaces we inhabit within a temporal context while exploring themes of home, memory and consciousness.
Deeply influenced by her upbringing in Bogotá, Laura infuses satire and grunge into her work. Her time in Montréal has further shaped her career, encouraging a bold embrace of experimental aesthetics and unconventional narratives.
Caraballour works with a variety of new media art forms, including 3D sculpting, virtual reality, and mixed-media installations, with experimentation as the cornerstone of her practice. She views new media art as a powerful tool for cultural retrieval, resilience, and preservation, particularly for those in the diaspora, creating accessible spaces for connection and knowledge-sharing.
Credits+
Sound designer: Sinjin Hawke