Daniela Lizbeth Palacios Granda

"At the Threshold of Leaving"

Section MS16, Sonia Levy

Keywords: care, knowledge, gesture, rituals

This project explores silent bodily rituals of care and protection as forms of generational memory. It focuses on gestures learned and repeated within Latin American familial spaces, such as crossing oneself before leaving, blowing over the body when sick, or placing hands on the shoulders as a sign of protection. Far from being empty habits or superstition, these minimal and everyday actions are charged with affection, faith, containment, and care. They mark an invisible threshold between the internal and the external, the everyday and the uncertain. Because these gestures leave no stable visual trace and resist documentation, the project approaches the body as an archive, activating memory through touch, warmth, air, and gentle friction rather than representation.