MI CASA NO ES SU CASA / MY HOME IS NOT YOUR HOME
Curated by Mauricio Esquivel
Curatorial and museographic assistance: Mauricio Kabistan
July 28, 2026.
Grainauer Strasse 19, Berlin, Germany.
ARTISTS:
José Cabezas, Lucy Tomasino, Eduardo Chang, Gerardo Gómez, Danny Zavaleta, Antonio Romero, Lissania Vatra, Josefina Paz, Verónica Vides, Victor Cruz y Hugo Portillo.
"MI CASA NO ES SU CASA", EDUARDO CHANG
This exhibition was first inspired by a piece of work made by Eduardo Chang, created as part of his experience migrating to San José, Costa Rica, during the first decade of the 2000s and presented in his solo exhibition Residente permanente por vínculo at the Centro Cultural de España in San Salvador in 2009. According to Gabriela Sáenz-Shelby, the work “addresses the contradictions and absurdities surrounding notions of borders, displacement, and trans-territoriality.”
As a curatorial team, we decided to present this selection of projects within a domestic space that contributes to and helps frame the dialogue between the works and the connotations of the individual and collective migratory processes experienced by Salvadorans over recent decades. A process that appears daily in the news, yet is also so intimate and personal that its emotional implications are difficult to quantify. The selection of works ranges from documentary to metaphorical approaches, culminating in poetic propositions. The exhibition presents works in a variety of formats and techniques through which each artist, from their own discipline, feels most comfortable addressing complex themes related to borders, displacement, and the migrant individual’s sense of belonging.
From a documentary perspective, we encounter the work of José Cabezas, a Salvadoran photojournalist with extensive experience who has documented migrant caravans and deportation processes across different periods in U.S. territory. In contrast, we include one of his personal bodies of work, outside the journalistic realm: his practice as an analog photographer, through which he has spent years documenting the Salvadoran landscape. Beautiful yet intimidating landscapes where both human vulnerability and the environment's fragility become evident.
We then transition into a vision that continues to use the camera as a documentary recording device, though this time from the artistic perspective proposed by Lucy Tomasino. In Horizontes, she develops a simultaneously experimental and documentary process through photographs of walls surrounding upper-class homes, documenting borders and class stratifications embodied by the bricks that protect them. These images are incapable of fully adhering to the paper due to the use of dyes extracted from flowers growing within the gardens enclosed by those same walls.
Then, on the floor of the apartment’s entrance hallway, a small welcome mat embroidered with the image of a tiny house displays Eduardo Chang’s phrase: “Mi casa no es su casa.” This piece contradicts the traditional welcoming messages found in many Hispanic households and, with a touch of ironic humor, reminds us how acceptance or rejection often depends on one’s demographic origin.
We continue with the work of Gerardo Gómez, a self-taught painter for more than twenty years. His particular vision of reality has turned him into a chronicler of everyday Salvadoran life in parks, bars, and tourist sites. Through his work, we transition from the photographic format and the camera toward the artist’s personal gaze and his ability to capture, through exaggerated perspectives, the daily life of the ordinary Salvadoran.
These contradictions are exemplified in Danny Zavaleta's work in co-creation with Mauricio Esquivel. Included in the exhibition is a small artifact that moves across temporalities through the effect created by placing images inside it, functioning as rudimentary three-dimensional slides. It represents a scenario in which the artist is displaced from the documentary photographic context into direct one-on-one contact with others. The View-Master shows the artist jumping a rail while performing a skateboarding trick; behind him, a pitched-roof house from his hometown of Ilopango bears graffiti alluding to one of the world’s most notorious gangs, known for its brutality. After an asylum process, Danny Zavaleta is now a permanent resident of Canada.
Facing this piece are two charcoal portraits by artist Antonio Romero that embody a tension between two figures, which, although materially distinct, remain in constant dialogue. On one side, a portrait that seems to resist becoming fixed: it never fully reveals itself nor consolidates an identity. A subject hidden behind a balaclava mask whose presence is not erased, but displaced into an ambiguous space between visibility and surveillance. In contrast to Danny Zavaleta’s piece—where the viewer hides the eyes of the person using it—here we see only the subject’s eyes, incapable of allowing us to recognize him. This dual register may be read through a situated experience: a reality marked by migration, where displacement is not only geographic but also tied to identity. Added to this is a present shaped by a strange combination of collective optimism and latent fear in the face of authoritarianism.
Between these two portraits by Antonio Romero, we encounter a video by artist Lissania Vatra, digging a hole in an attempt to reach somewhere, though her excavation tool is nothing more than a small spoon. In her own words: “…me di cuenta de que también estaba hecha de viento; ahora ya no sé adónde ir.” (…I realized that I, too, was made of wind; now I no longer know where to go.”)
“Should I go back to where I came from, or cry ten thousand years to bring the forest back?” quotes Josefina Paz in an action recorded in the dunes of Santa Teresa, New Mexico, a migratory corridor. The work addresses a constantly shifting landscape of resilience and transition, between countries and between life and death.
Facing this entire previous ensemble, we present the work of Verónica Vides, who voluntarily chose exile in Argentine Patagonia for several years and has now returned to El Salvador. She presents a piece in which human beings are returned to a natural ecosystem rather than being perceived as intruders or potential extractors. The reason for her inclusion in this exhibition is simple: in nature, when the resources of an ecosystem are exploited without the possibility of regeneration, endemic species migrate in order to survive, adapt, or become extinct. In this case, in the documentation of her performance in a park in Madrid, Spain, the artist camouflages herself by constructing a suit of leaves, branches, and other natural elements recovered from the same environment.
We close—or perhaps open, depending on how one chooses to see it—in the apartment kitchen with a piece by artists Víctor Cruz and Hugo Portillo. A work that is visually beautiful yet simultaneously nostalgic and painful. In the video, we see a single banana plant standing upright in the middle of a snowy landscape. The scene immediately activates a discourse on migration and evokes the experience of inhabiting foreign spaces. The artist, who has lived in Austria for many years, summarizes in this brief monologue one migratory experience among many, yet one that remains profoundly significant on multiple levels:
“A few days ago I planted a banana tree,
then I thought maybe it would never bear fruits.
Then, I cut the leaves off and made tamales”
Mauricio Esquivel
Berlin, Germany — Spring 2026
