This durational and partially public performance of open-ended processes had no predetermined completion time and no specified audience. On the backyard fence of my Montreal home, I placed a life-sized portrait image of my father Iván as a child, with his mother (my grandmother Lucía) and his older brother, my uncle Raúl, which was taken in Venezuela (c.1944).
I decided to leave the image facing toward my window, exposed to the changing conditions and natural elements of an early Montreal autumn. In this setting, I would sit next to them as if I were part of the portrait.
Over days of this performative play, as well as noting, photographing and video recording the changes over time, I sensed a poetics of decay and erasure occurring that claims their presence from the forced absence, disappearance: when their image-portrait was ‘here’ paradoxically implied a deep sense of their absence.