Cantera started in August 2024, when our landlord called to inform us that we needed to leave the apartment. Out of the blue, sometime in the months ahead, our family history would be wiped away from the house so that another could start in the same place. From that moment, I started to document the many things that had created an illusion of belonging and possession in a place that had never been ours: the paintings on the wall, the arrangement of furniture, the way the spaces are occupied, the emptiness of all elements as workers stripped the flooring.
Cantera aims to create a dialogue between the two predominant readings of the term household (readings that are mutually exclusive, opposed, and cannot be conceived in the presence of the other). The first reading views the house as property, as an asset for speculation and extraction. The second, the most familiar, conceives it in its purest definition as home and place we build to provide intimacy to a portion of the world where we soak up much of who we become.