Displaced
By Alex Mendez Giner
I am a descendant of immigrants who became an immigrant myself. Half of my family fled Spain during the Spanish Civil War, arriving in Venezuela just after World War II. I grew up with a grandfather who impressed upon me the importance of Spain as our Motherland. Now I find myself repeating my family’s story, but the idea of a Motherland is not clear anymore.
Across the last seven years, I have experienced firsthand what it means to be an immigrant. I belong to the so-called “Venezuelan Diaspora,” often defined as the voluntary emigration of millions escaping the Bolivarian Revolution regime. During the long years of political oppression and economic failure under president Hugo Chavez, Venezuela became a monumental airtight cell, where we all slowly began to asphyxiate.
Without initially realizing it, I became a pawn on history's chess board, relegating my "personal process" to a series of moves in a larger historical game. It has been seven years now since I was welcomed in the US and in a way, granted a sort of reincarnation in life. These years as an immigrant have given me a new perspective about migratory processes.
In 2014, I began to develop a video project that would explore immigration issues from an intensely personal perspective. While I recognize that every art work is to some degree political, my idea was not to produce a documentary about immigration and immigration policy in the U.S.—far from it. My goal was intimate: to explore my observations, experiences and feelings as an immigrant today.
The project takes the form of a poetic experiment. In the piece, I explore my recent experiences of constant movement between distant geographic spaces, from Venezuela to the US, to Italy, Thessaloniki, Colombia, Laos and beyond. I attempt to understand my thoughts and feelings as a self-recognized immigrant. This process began long before I was born and constantly brings me to the words of Brazilian writer Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes in his essay “Cinema: A Trajectory within Underdevelopment” (1973):
"Not European, not American. Having no original culture, nothing is foreign to us because everything is foreign. Our painful self-creation develops between the rarefied dialectics of not to be or being other."
Through this project I have discovered that home is a fluid word and belonging a state of mind
About the Artist
Alex Mendez Giner
Alex Mendez Giner is a filmmaker whose works defy the boundaries of storytelling, exploring complex characters at the intersection of subjective experience, reality and the marvelous real. His meticulously designed images, redolent of an allegorical atmosphere, create a visual experience capable to subsume other senses.
He has screened in major international film festivals including Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival, Milan International Film Festival, Viña del Mar International Film Festival, Sapporo International Film Festival, Guadalajara International Film Festival, Bilbao International Film Festival, and Durban International Film Festival. He is recipient of the Audience Choice Award from the Shanghai International Film Festival, the Grand Prize from the Snowtown Film Festival, the Best Film and Best Directing Awards from the Caracas City Hall Film Awards, the Best Story Award from the Buffalo-Niagara Film Festival, and a production grant from the New York State Council of the Arts.
He is founder artist of the Multimedia Center for the Arts at the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas and has been guest speaker at Santa Maria Della Scala Museum in Siena, University of the Andes in Colombia, State University of New York at Oswego, the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg and the National University of Laos, among others. His professional practice combines constant film production with film teaching at Syracuse University.