4 Towards an Archive
I
Collecting
        This archive began as a habit of keeping. I photograph the moments around me, a wall, a doorway, the light on a street, because I have learned how quickly a place can be taken from you. Collecting them is a way of listening to my loved ones, holding onto their memories, and keeping them close enough to touch.
                           
  
Note: Here, you can move the images, place them next to one another, and make meetings that could not have happened in time or in space. Every arrangement is temporary, and every one is a new way of making home. 

II
Recognizing

           Over time, I began to see what the images had in common. So many of them return to Caribbean domestic architecture: the rejas on a window, the persianas, a balcony, a wooden house painted a color no one would choose for a building in the North. I started to recognize the beauty in what I had been collecting, the colors that fade in the sun, the textures of wood, concrete, and iron, the way a home shows the hands that kept it. 

        These houses were built inside histories of control, and still the people who lived in them made them soft, bright, and their own.

III
Encounters

        Now I think of the archive as a place of encounters. 
                                       The archive is not finished.

                                                                                          It keeps being
 rearranged by 

                                                                            whoever passes through it.
                       
                   

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