Claudia Claremi

The Memory of Fruits is a project about forgotten fruits, those that do not circulate in a strictly commercial way or have disappeared from everyday life, in the context of Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

The work is articulated around two elements. Images on the one hand, the hands of people “holding” in the void the shape of their remembered fruit, and text on the other hand, their voices as fragments of the collective memory, personal anecdotes and the impressions that spring from the memory of these fruits.

The project proposes an individual interpretation of sensorial memory by recording everything exclusively in an analogue format (16mm film developed by hand) and the reconstruction through words. The Memory of Fruits thus becomes an unusual inventory of the fruit of each country and a collective Caribbean tale of affections, flavours, plants, migration and colonialism.

The first part of this series was produced in Puerto Rico with the support of Beta Local and the 2015 Injuve Creation Grants. In Madrid, the project will focus on the Cuban and Dominican diasporas. Sections produced in each country will then be added to the pieces, so that the stories of the migrant communities will be linked to the stories of those who have remained in their place of origin

Claudia Claremi
Spain/Cuba
Born in Madrid, 1986

A graduate in Documentary Filmmaking from the International Film School of San Antonio de los Baños (Cuba) and in Fine Arts from the University of the Arts London (UK) and the Havana Higher Institute of Art of (Cuba). She has taken part in alternative artistic study and production programmes such as the Programme Oriented to Subaltern Practices (P.O.P.S.) (Ayllu, Matadero, Madrid), Campus (Latitudes, Barcelona) and La Práctica (Beta Local, Puerto Rico). Her films Spark (Centella), Bat (Murciélago) and The Mountain (El Monte), among others, have been screened and have won awards in such international film festivals as Raindance, Ann Arbor, Ji.hlava, FICGuadalajara, Documentamadrid or Lo Schermo dell’Arte. In 2020 she obtained two awards, the 21st Generation 2021 Award (Montemadrid Foundation, La Casa Encendida), and the 31st Plastic Arts Circuits Award (Community of Madrid) and she developed Time (El Tiempo), a film created in collaboration with the Reina Sofía Museum.