Adriana Fontes
Traces
At
the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, a huge wave
of immigrants came through the U.S. Port of Immigration on Ellis Island. They
arrived in a big hall where doctors conducted twenty-second health inspections
and made charcoal marks on the clothes of some passengers: “H” for suspected
heart trouble, “L” for lameness, and “X” for feeble-mindedness. The individuals
who were marked were removed from the line and taken across the room, where
they were locked in a kind of cage. Some of the immigrants lived there for
months or even years.
I
hope to shed light on this practice, leading the viewer across a bridge from
the past to the present-day through the abandoned Ellis Island quarantine
hospital. Images of emptiness and ghostly reflection create a border between
memory and imagination, addressing the feelings of solitude, exclusion, and
isolation that still linger. It’s an invitation to delve into a historical
moment as an homage, revisiting these facts for a kind of redemption through
art. It’s also a look into what has remained, traces of a time that previously
seemed stagnant, but somehow echoes in our contemporary world.
Website