Fragment No. 84

When the fragment arrived, I turned it over in my hands and thought about the wonderful places it had been. It was that same day that I found out I was pregnant with my first child.

So then, life interrupted. 

In the whirlwind of pregnancy and childbirth — the long nights, the waiting, the astonishment of becoming a mother — I forgot about the fragment for a while. Only now, with my daughter asleep beside me, do I return to it.

She has just entered the world, and already her life is threaded with many places. She will hold four passports. She will grow up on a small Spanish island off the coast of Africa. She will hear different languages at the dinner table. Her lullabies will carry more than one accent. Her sense of “home” will not be singular — it will be layered.

Holding this fragment now, I think about what culture really means. It is not something fixed or fragile. It is something woven — strand by strand — through movement, exchange, and coexistence. A carpet does not lose its integrity because it is made of many colors. It becomes richer.

Europe, for me, is like that. Complex, imperfect, sometimes loud and contradictory — but profoundly shaped by centuries of cultural crossings. I am deeply grateful to have the opportunity to live in a place where borders can be bridges, where identities can overlap, where my daughter’s multiplicity is not an exception but part of a long story of exchange.

This fragment once belonged to a whole. Now it travels independently, gathering new meaning in each home it visits. I hope that my daughter will do the same — carrying with her the places she comes from, and adding her own threads to the pattern.

As I photographed it beneath the banana leaves — roots deep in volcanic soil, leaves reaching outward — I realised that this is what I want for her: strong roots, wide horizons.

Culture is not something we inherit untouched.

It is something we continue.