This project examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of "conocimiento" through photographic installation, archival research, and spatial storytelling. Expanding from my recent installations, Sana Sana and Three Ladders y un Recuerdo, the work explores how inherited trauma, migration, ritual practice, and maternal memory move through the body and domestic spaces rather than through direct narration. Using photography in these constructed environments and threshold spaces, I explore materializing "conocimiento" as both a personal and generationally collective process of processing hidden truths.
In 2020, Alzheimer’s and dementia gradually altered my grandmother’s mental cognition. To her relationship with memory, language, and recognition. Conversations became nonlinear. Time collapsed in on itself. Stories that had remained buried for decades surfaced unexpectedly through fragmented recollections, repeated phrases, and moments where past and present became indistinguishable. Hidden objects throughout her apartment became points of connection, linking material traces to oral narratives, inherited memories, and forms of knowledge that had remained dormant for generations.
Through this framework, I began exploring the idea that my grandmother had become our family's "Nepantlera", a term Anzaldúa refers to as an individual who can explore thresholds of conflicting worlds. My grandmother moved throughout these fractured spaces psychologically, spiritually, and ancestrally. Allowing her living family moments of generational respite through her uncovered truths.
ARTIST BIO: Sammie Correa is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, and educator whose work examines maternal lineage, migration, ritual practice, grief, and inherited trauma through photography, installation, archival research, and performance. Working primarily with 4×5 large-format photography, family archives, sculptural materials, and domestic objects, Correa constructs immersive environments that investigate how memory is transmitted through embodied practices, spirituality, and everyday rituals rather than direct narration. Her installations function as spaces where personal histories intersect with broader conversations surrounding diaspora, care, religion, and collective memory.
Correa is currently an MFA candidate in Photography and Intermedia at the University of Iowa and holds dual Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in Photography & Film and Art Education from Virginia Commonwealth University. Prior to graduate school, she spent nearly a decade as an art educator in public schools, museums, and community arts organizations throughout the Washington, D.C. region, developing photography and visual arts programming.
Artist email for press release contact: sammiegcorrea@gmail.com
instagram: @sammie.correa
This event is part of Fall of Freedom. @falloffreedom