Arrival is never singular. It is layered, haunted by the steps that came before and the distances

that remain ahead. To arrive is to declare presence, yet it is also to carry the invisible weight of

displacement, of exile, of the long road that does not end at the door.

 

The question “When did you arrive?” appears simple, but it unsettles. It can be asked in curiosity, but also in suspicion. It marks the stranger, the migrant, the newcomer, the one who does not yet belong. It echoes in airports, in borders, in towns where accents betray origins, in rooms where histories are erased. To be asked when you arrived is also to be reminded that your presence is provisional, that recognition is conditional, that belonging is something you must prove again and again.

 

These works dwell in that fragile terrain. They speak of thresholds crossed and yet uncrossed, of homes left behind and homes not yet found. Textures emerge like scars of journey, colors fold into one another like overlapping geographies, and forms seem suspended between exile and return. Arrival here is not an endpoint but a restless negotiation with visibility and erasure.

 

And hope — what of hope ? Hope accompanies every departure, every crossing, every act of

return. Yet here it is interrogated. What kind of hope is it that fuels migration? The hope of better lives, of freedom, of futures still unwritten. But also the fragile hope of being welcomed, of being seen as equal, of being allowed to stay. Too often, hope is tested, bruised, deferred. Entire generations live in the waiting room of hope, suspended between what was left and what has not yet arrived.

 

Still, hope persists, though it is no longer innocent. It is carried like contraband in memory, like a hidden seed in the folds of clothing. It is fragile, but it survives in acts of making, in the courage to step again into spaces that once excluded, in the quiet refusal to vanish. These works bear witness to that survival—hope that is fractured yet luminous, a hope that knows the pain of disappointment yet continues to breathe.

 

“When Did You Arrive?” is also a question of intimacy. It asks when we entered each other’s lives, when we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable, when we recognized ourselves in another’s story. Arrival is not only about geography—it is about the heart, about the thresholds of trust and tenderness.

 

This exhibition becomes a gathering of such thresholds. It refuses the idea of arrival as

completion and instead lingers in the fragile in-between: between exile and return, between

estrangement and belonging, between despair and hope. It asks viewers not only to witness

these arrivals but to reflect on their own. When did you arrive at who you are now? When did youlose hope, and when did it return? When will you arrive again?

​

-Les Amacio