Rojo is the Colour of Memory

“Rojo is the Colour of Memory” is a multi-media project about my immigration experience and my identity as a 1.5 generation Chilean immigrant to Canada through the colours red and rojo (the Spanish word for “red”). In this project, I focus on a memory: encountering the colour “red” when I was eight and had just moved to Canada, and the disorientation of that experience. For me, red did not look like rojo: red was more pinkish in hue and rojo, more orangey. Rojo is what I had grown up with in Chile. It had been my favourite colour. But red was not rojo, and that was a confusing and enlightening insight. Through these colours, this project explores the bodily shiftings that occur in the context of im/migration, and what gets lost in translation, which is not necessarily always a linguistic loss. Red and rojo is composed of 77 abstract drawings and written fragments that return to that memory to recuperate and rediscover. This project has been grounding and has allowed me to understand my in-between identity, which emerges between two cultural horizons.