Remnants of Forking Paths

Remnants of Forking Paths considers migration as both a historical condition and an intimate, ongoing experience. Orellana uses photography, collage, and found materials to explore the Ecuadorian migrant experience that emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, following Ecuador’s economic crisis and a wave of migration to New York and Spain at large.

The installation brings together images made in Castilla-La Mancha, Spain and Machala, Ecuador, alongside collages incorporating Orellana’s family photographs, religious iconography, pre-columbian imagery, historical stamps, among others. Treating the archive as boundless and unstable, Orellana removes, resizes, layers, and repositions images, placing people in relation to domestic and public spaces. In this process, the photograph shifts from document to material– a site where personal memory and historical narratives can be reconsidered and contested.

Orellana’s practice examines photography’s role in classifying and representing migrant bodies. Rather than treating the documentary image as neutral, these works propose a visual record shaped by lived experience and self-determination. The images hold migration’s contradictions between departure and arrival, intimacy and estrangement, inheritance and reinvention.

Ultimately, Remnants of Forking Paths considers belonging not as a fixed attachment to place, but as something continually reconstructed through memory, movement, and the making of home.

Johan Orellana (b. 1998) is an Ecuadorian-born, and both a Spaniard and American-raised, visual artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Shaped by his pluralistic upbringing and by moving between cultures and geographies, he is driven to explore the complexities of belonging and memory. His body of work, a mix of photographic approaches, encapsulates moments of high experiential affinity in which individuals, objects, and landscapes become interrelated representations of the artist’s visual brain map. He is interested in visual dichotomies, parallels, intersections, and tangents, which mainly result in observations about domestic and public spaces, the recontextualization of national historical and family archives, and the documentation of a geographical area or community.