Familial Ground is an autobiographical installation work that includes digitally altered self-portrait photographs, reproductions of pages from an artist’s book, videotapes, and aural works. It is about grounding identity within a familial and cultural history subject to erasures, geographic displacements, and cultural dislocations. It is the result of a process of gathering and connecting scattered fragments of a past history while acknowledging the impossibility of complete retrieval.
In the Fall of 2008 Rafael will be having a book on this material published by Princeton Architectural Press.
