Lorena Molina

For the past six years, I’ve been exploring questions of identity in the margins. I view the margins both as a place where extreme violence and pain happen, and as a place for resisting, dreaming, healing and thriving.

The images in, This must be the place, include still life arrangements, landscapes, and portraits that represent and attempt to piece together what my home in the margins looks like. As well as a reconciliation, acceptance and celebration of the immigrant experience that seeks to center my experience and place in the world outside of the trauma of displacement; thus creating a place that allows for joy, play, beauty, pleasure, slowness and decadence.

These images have been a site of ongoing experimentation, forming a growing catalog that resists the burden of representation and instead allows for nuance and play. The installation continues to evolve as I add new photographs, ecologies and objects, shifting alongside my understanding of place and belonging.

Through a maximalist approach, I work against minimalist photographic traditions by embracing sensory excess, vibrant color, and dense layering. Tropical fruits and flora, shaped by histories of trade, exploitation, and migration, serve as both subject and material, evoking questions of labor, desire, and cultural identity. I deconstruct and reassemble plants entangled with colonial legacies, peeling back their visual and symbolic layers to reveal histories of power, extraction, and resistance.

Together, these gestures insist on a sensorial, embodied relationship to place, one that holds its violence while also honoring the wetness, heat, fruitfulness, resilience, and fire of the places and the people I adore. The work holds a layered sense of belonging, one that is not tied to a singular geography or fixed borders, but shaped through our movements, the body, our memories, and everyday lived experiences.
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"…Learning to see my place in the world in the margins comes with a painful history, but it has also allowed me to create a place for myself. It has allowed to create a home full of slashes and semicolons and love in all the places.

My home in the margins is a good home too.

It has real estate everywhere. The landscape is lush and with a full range. This home has tropical weather and palm trees and the ocean. It has winters and snow. This home has corn fields, lemon trees, and farm animals everywhere. It is also full of “I will see you later” and “I miss you too” in both English, Spanish and spanglish. It is adapting to the knowing feeling that something is always missing, but this is home too"- Quote from my talk, “A Balancing Act on Home, Art, and Academia: A Reckoning from the Margins”,