Every migration begins the same way: with the body arriving before the self does.

I have lived in Mexico, the United States, Canada, Germany, and Spain. Since I was nine years old, movement has been my condition — not chosen at first, then chosen, then simply who I am. What I've learned, crossing cities and countries for three decades, is that beneath the surface differences — language, food, rhythm, light — there are visual patterns that repeat. Rules written in color and geometry. A grammar of belonging that no border fully erases.

Crossed Cultures is a body of work built from landscape photography and pattern design. Each piece begins with panoramic images of cities that have shaped me: their representative sites, their particular atmosphere, the way their geometry falls in certain light. From those images I extract shapes and compose them into optical systems — layered colors and forms that generate illusions, that shimmer between what a place looks like and what it has felt like to be inside it.

The compositional language draws on the tradition of the totem — specifically the emblematic structures of Indigenous cultures of the Americas, where carved forms stack and interlock to tell the story of a lineage, a territory, a people. I work with this visual grammar not to appropriate it, but because it speaks precisely to what this project is about: the vertical accumulation of encounters. Every city I've lived in has given me a clan — people without whom surviving a new code of rules and lifestyles would have been impossible. The totems I construct are emblems of those people. They are portraits without faces. Evidence of lives that became, over time, part of mine.

This is also a project about semiotics — about learning to read the visual signs embedded in the built and natural environments of each place I've inhabited, and finding that those signs rhyme across cultures in ways that unsettle easy notions of belonging and foreignness.

Crossed Cultures is the sum of those readings. And it is a tribute — to every migrant who has opened a path, erected a sign, and left something of themselves in the cities that received them.

"I've lost count of how many times I've returned to this city — but it has been more than to the city I was born in." — Jd