Alexia Paz Escobar

Sincretismo Desplazado is a sculpture exploring the experience of immigration and how displacement affects how people experience time and being present in their bodies. Mythology often intermingles with our behaviors and beliefs, supporting a notion that seeming opposites can co-exist: life/death, sacred/profane, the physical/intangible, etc. The idea of the crossroads as the point of intersection between two planes is especially powerful regarding themes of immigration, belonging, meditation and transport as well as the cultural difference in pace and time in two countries. The bus-shaped sculpture reflects the facade of two different types of buses: a typical STM bus, and a bus from Bolivia. It additionally, explores the expectations of arriving in Canada, how different it might be from what you expect, how unwelcome immigrants can feel, and how constant changes in immigration regulations leave families, students, and their livelihoods in a constant state of vulnerability and fear for their status in the country. This sculpture plays with tensions regarding identity and the body, exploring how these themes intertwine with anthropomorphic representations of human and mythical creatures in Bolivian folklore.