Home.   Projects.  Research. About.  CV + Contact.    

---

Rituals at the Shoreline of Identity is a mixed-media research installation that explores how the queer migrant body can be reimagined as a site of resistance, memory, and transformation through embodied encounters with salt and water.

The project combines video-performance, material experimentation, and altar-making. Family photographs were submerged in Mediterranean seawater over fifteen days; as the water evaporated, salt crystallised on the image surfaces, corroding and transforming them into what I call a haunted archive, knowledge that leaks, stains, and survives in fragments.

The final installation recreated a shoreline floor environment: sand, eroded photographs, salt crystals, glass containers, candlelight, and a projected video-performance filmed at sundown on the Mediterranean coast.

Theoretical framework: Neimanis (hydrofeminism), Anzaldúa (nepantla), Hartman (critical fabulation), Preciado, Haraway, Barad, Butler.

---

This thesis traces a fluid cartography of resistance through ritual, performance, and material engagement with salt and water. Rooted in queer theory, posthuman feminism, and speculative design, it explores how the queer migrant body can become a site of memory, rupture, and transformation. Rather than aiming for clarity or archival preservation, this research embraces what leaks, corrodes, and stains, grounding residue as a site of knowledge. Drawing on practices of altar-making, embodied performance, and experimental image-making, the project reimagines legacy through speculative lineage and affective archives.

The shoreline becomes a living threshold between land and sea, past and future, belonging and exile, where the body performs not to represent, but to remember and reconfigure. The research culminated in a ritual performance enacted at sundown on the Mediterranean coast — an embodied encounter with water, salt, and ancestral image that the thesis had theorised but could only fully produce through the act itself.

Salt and water act not as passive symbols, but as epistemic agents that shape knowledge through decay and relation. This work does not arrive at answers, but at gestures — toward world-making, toward kinship beyond blood, toward remembering that resists resolution. It is an offering to queer and migrant imaginaries, a call to stay with what refuses to disappear.

- From the thesis: Rituals at the Shoreline of Identity, BAU Barcelona, 2025,

---

---

---

The experimental methodology ran in two parallel conditions: sealed glass containers, where photographs
were enclosed with seawater, sand, and coarse salt; and open containers, subject to the same elements but exposed to evaporation and air. Both sets ran concurrently, allowing different mediation regimes — containment versus exposure — to produce different archival logics.

Time became its own material. The final photographs submerged could not complete their drying cycle before the thesis presentation. Rather than abandoning the experiment, I developed an improvised technique drawn from analogue darkroom practice: wrapping each piece in absorbent paper and hanging them from the clothes drying rack outside my window — a structure suspended between building and street, between interior and exterior, between private and public.

The gesture closed a loop the research had not anticipated. The shoreline had already been theorised as a threshold — the zone where land meets sea, where belonging meets exile, where the body encounters what it cannot control. Here, unexpectedly, was another one: work about salt, water, and the Mediterranean, dried by Barcelona air, hanging above a Barcelona street, held between inside and outside in the way things have always been held here. The method became part of the meaning.

---

---

Full thesis available to download, Rituals at the Shoreline of Identity, BAU Barcelona, 2025 (PDF)
ThesisDownload