Familia Henríquez Vega

The Ant Project presents, for the first time, the work developed during the family residency of Lisu, Juan, Julián, and Fausto: Recuerdo olvidando.

In this open studio, the Henríquez Vega family has developed both a shared family residency project and individual artistic practices, creating a collective space for making, exchange, and experimentation.

Recuerdo olvidando is the opening line of a poem written by Julián, eighteen years old and about to begin his undergraduate studies in visual arts. The phrase distills the essence of the interconnected projects by parents and son, tracing a constellation that extends across past, present, continuity, and memory. Here, the domestic sphere becomes a catalyst for encounters and estrangements, giving rise to stories of intimacy and affection, but also of grief, loss, and forgetting—forces that, like resilient seeds and roots, continually renew and regenerate memory.

Lisu explores the continuity of her roots through a contemporary approach to textile processes inherited within her family lineage. Through weaving, she reflects on experiences of grief, migration, and memory, understanding textiles as a living space of resistance and repair.

Julián works across painting and poetry, conceiving them as parallel practices through which he confronts the ways he perceives himself. For him, the intersection of painting and poetry allows each medium to articulate what the other cannot.

Juan works with materials that have fallen outside commercial circulation: fabrics, supports, coverings, and containers that carry memories of their own. Their wear, marks, and textures emerge not only as formal qualities of color and graphic surfaces, but also as traces of accumulated histories and of a direct relationship to place.

Fausto, the youngest member of the family at ten years old, has developed a series of portraits that shift the viewer away from the conventional frontal gaze toward angles that distort the subject while revealing another perspective.

The Ant Project invites visitors to this open studio—the first of its kind—where the threads of family constellations blossom through the cracks of displacement, nurturing the impulse that sustains life: intergenerational bonds, and the resilient ties that make regeneration possible.

—The Ant Project