Creative Direction | Editor

“Fresh Picked Workers” was created for the exhibition “Secret Gardens” (the Window, Paris, 2023), a show exploring the hidden worlds and messages beneath the beatuy we see in gardens around the world. In “Fresh Picked Workers” I examine the abuses of South American migrant workers in the US agricultural system. This tryptic of dioramas projects the lasting, ignored struggles of migrant farm workers and their importance to the balance of food production in the United States. 

The first diarama represents dreams left behind due to the illegal entrapment of workers, illuminated by images of promise and solidatiry, mainly the American Farmworkers movement, narrated by the voice of Caesar Chavez. The second integrate holographic imagery to project a ghostly image of workers over a dried and rotting tomato field, speaking to the invisibility of these workers to the general public and the fruits in the absence of the workers. This  decay of the tomatoes also accents the decay of the promised so called “American Dream”, the images the ghosts in memorium of workers killed by extreme working condtions.  The final piece is the modern era of the migrant experience, portraying flight and items left behind by frequent flight in fear of deporation, closure of farms due to illicit activity or the selling of workers from one farm to another, further narrated by a collage of found footage newscast and journalistic pieces on the topic, played over a cellphone