Persona

Persona is the story of a fictional character who is born, lives, and acts within social networks—it is the story of a hybrid creation. A woman entirely fabricated, blurring the boundaries between a fictional character, a virtual avatar, and the actress behind her screen. She has a name, shares her memories, her outbursts, writes texts, posts photos, comments, likes, and shares.

It is a role-playing performance, where the audience participates in shaping the narrative. Can existence be simulated?

Can a story be invented without a body or a physical vessel? And what remains of this character once released onto the web—of their fragmented, diluted, and coded story?

Have you come across her online?

In this relentless quest for identity and image, Alma digs through the memories of others, through found objects, through everything that belongs to no one, in an attempt to build a life for herself. The collage work primarily represents the search for an image, a body to inhabit. I drew from my own family photos and worked with pictures of strangers found in archive boxes—strange faces that no one recognized. Childhood friends of my grandparents, classmates lost for more than thirty years, friends of cousins met at a single party, or ID photos stumbled upon by chance, detached from the memory of my own family.

The work on these faces focused on camouflaging their defining features, as an attempt to make these people disappear and take their place.