Fantasmita (ghostly)

2023, 46 x 62”, embroidery on an upcycled bed sheet dyed with coffee, turmeric, and ash. Photos by Nadia Bautista. 

I harvest snapshots from the perspective of my grandmothers balcony from Google Maps. Then trace it, including glitches, onto an old bed sheet dyed with scraps of my daily intake. The image, reversed, is embroidered resulting in a ghostly copy between the living and the dead, the physical and the digital, the past and the future.

The fabric is object, installation, space, and intimate refuge of auto-ethnography, and reflective of the consciousness of memory. Fantasmita (ghostly) invites us to connect with our own unfinished grief, with the warp of memory that holds us between yesterday and tomorrow.

Like a construction site the ghostly copy situates us in a space in progress. This conceptual opening  is the purpose the space holds, allowing us to lower our guard and connect within.