Artist Talk at PHotoEspaña: Reimagining Family Histories: Photography, Grief, and More-than-Human Memory

What does it mean to revisit family history through photography today? How can images help us navigate grief, migration, silence, ecological memory, and inherited narratives?

This conversation brings together artists Joel Jimenez, Cristóbal Ascencio, and Francesca Hummler, whose practices each engage photography as a way of reimagining relationships to family, loss, and memory. Working across archives, moving image, installation, digital intervention, and collaborative photographic practices, the artists explore how photographs continue to transform long after the moment they depict.

Joel Jimenez’s ongoing project “Glimmers, feathers and staring skies” reflects on mourning, migration, and interspecies memory through the figure of the hummingbird, weaving together family archives, colonial histories, and Costa Rican folk belief. Cristóbal Ascencio’s “Flowers die twice” revisits the delayed revelation of his father’s suicide through manipulated archival imagery, photogrammetry, and virtual reality environments that question how memory survives through technology. Francesca Hummler’s work “Das Kuckucksei” explores familial intimacy, migration, and generational trauma through self-portraiture, collaborative image-making, and photo-therapeutic methodologies.

There will be time at the end of the conversation for audience questions.