The Funereal Home is a video installation developed through a series of performances and rituals that explore displacement, mourning, fear, memory, and the search for belonging. Created while living away from Peru, the work emerged from an attempt to understand what happens to our sense of home when we are physically separated from the place where identity was formed.
I gathered natural and found objects from places including Regent's Park and Epping Forest and brought them into the gallery, transforming the exhibition space into a fragmented domestic and ritual landscape. A fallen chair, a tree trunk, branches, bottles, photographs, and video become traces of a home that is simultaneously familiar, displaced, and transformed.
Within the performances, I buried my body in the earth and cut my hair as an offering to the land in which I was living. Hair holds particular significance within Peruvian female identity; its removal became an intimate gesture of mourning, separation, and an attempt to establish a relationship with a new landscape.
The performances were documented through photography. I later immersed the photographic celluloid in water collected from the River Thames, allowing the material carrying the image to gradually dissolve. Through the destruction of the photographic image, the work considers memory as something fragile and mutable.
The Funereal Home becomes at once a domestic space, a grave, an altar, and a landscape—a place where loss is performed and where the possibility of creating another sense of home can emerge.