~ CAMILLE BARRIOS ~

I come from a highly creative, alternative and very artistic family. From a very young age I learned the importance of gender equality and respect for diverse fluidity, as my mother courageously embraced her own path as a lesbian woman in the 1980s in Boston. My father and his incredibly artistic and visionary soul brought into my life architecture, photography, good food and bossa nova guitar in the mornings. He also brought me a mirror and a need to protect myself as I witnessed the struggles of alcohol addiction and the deep process of self destruction this brings to oneself and their family. I thank both my parents for their love for life and their own ecstatic encounter as young hippies in the 1970s. At some point I was also shown how mothering could assume wider contexts by lovingly welcoming into my life my stepmother, a rock.

My paternal grandfather Armando Barrios was an extremely important Venezuelan painter who together with my grandmother Reyna Rivas, a poet and philosopher, gave me such an inspiring home library in which I would lose myself in books during my adolescent years. And of course my maternal grandmother and grandfather who offered me a sweet and holding home filled with Venezuelan traditions and love for our country, where I could just go in and be held by them and be a child.

Through all this I have lived in many places, London, Boston, Milan, Caracas, and that has brought a worldwide view of what it means to be a Latin American emigrant and immigrant. And indeed it has not always been fully welcoming.