Monica Terrero

The Absent Man is an ongoing multimedia project that grapples with the realities of my late father’s life. It is an ongoing catalog of the thoughts, frustrations, and feeling of inconclusiveness that death leaves behind. His abandoned paraphernalia has provided valuable insight into his life, allowing me to foster a sense of closeness from the distance that death forms amongst individuals. These artifacts and heirlooms physicalize a system of events, affairs, and occasions, which I could not have remembered otherwise.

This project is an exhaustive attempt to understand my late father, through the impossible assignment of organizing, managing, and making sense of a life cut short. By reassembling his footage and incorporating present information with past, I began to solve some of the puzzles that had been left unsolved for eleven years. Through a process of observation and interviewing, I started to make sense of a complicated individual and all the conditions he lived through. Though we can no longer communicate, by relying on what he has left behind, I have gotten to know him more intimately. monicaterrero.com