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Marks of Memory
Cristina Goettsch Mittermeier’s mixed-media collages emerge from a life lived across borders. Shaped by migration, displacement, and an intentional return to Mexico, her country of origin, these works explore belonging, identity, and the quiet endurance of women whose lives unfold within systems not built for them.
Each piece begins with one of Mittermeier’s photographs, often portraying women whose dignity persists despite historical erasure, inequality, or marginalization. Onto these images, she layers hand-cut floral forms made from personal documents gathered over a lifetime—passports, birth certificates, visas, and legal records. Stripped of their bureaucratic authority, these papers are transformed into symbols of resilience, growth, and survival.
The flowers act as both offering and reclamation. They soften the rigidity of official records without erasing them, asserting authorship over narratives shaped by control, permission, and judgment. In giving flowers back to women and children whose stories are often told for them—or not at all—Mittermeier creates a gesture of care, recognition, and quiet exchange.
Rooted in the visual language of Mexican artistic traditions and Latin American magical realism, these collages inhabit a space where memory becomes material, the extraordinary feels natural, and beauty emerges not as decoration, but as testimony.
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