I have decided to make the narrative for this project more personal, but not necessarily autobiographical. Like what visual artist Shirin Neshat talks about in a podcast (30:05) when asked about boundaries and truthfulness in her work:
The way I do it is I make very personal work. I don’t just choose a subject and say oh, that’s a hard political subject, I’m going to make a work about it. I make work that relates directly to my own personal life that I have felt the pain. You know, you can’t fake pain. You can’t fake the anxiety of being an immigrant, f or example, or political injustice or anxiety of different kinds. So I think my methodology is I make the work as personal as possible but not autobiographical because that doesn’t interest me. And when you’re personal, people believe you because there’s a lot of transparency, there’s a lot of emotion, and I think that’s my approach. I don’t know how other artists do it.
I can’t talk about a universality in the migrant stories because I can’t account for everyone’s experience, but right now I can talk about what I am closer to, from where I am standing, which is what I am living here.
Maxim Zaragoza 