Mamá Mia (2025)

A body of work compiling five videos exploring the mother-daughter bond (single and two-channel)

In my body of work, "Mama Mia", I gather videos of myself and my mom in our daily lives, video-documented performances, and symbolic imagery to explore cultural diasporas, generational trauma, and the bond between a single mother and her daughter. My work carries these fragments together, allowing them to interact and weave together into an introspective meditation on girlhood within the human condition. I wanted to explore these themes through a body of work as opposed to a single video piece because I want the connections between each topic to be made through juxtaposition, each video focusing on a different idea. The concept of this project came about while rewatching my video installation “Lingua Franca” (2024), in which I created a performance piece together with my mom. I realized just how connected we are not only through our love for languages, but also many other aspects of our personalities that are quite similar. Sometimes, I catch myself speaking like her or acting like her, and other people have noted this as well. This is representative of the plurality of identity, which refers to how a person has multiple sides of themselves all influenced by the people around them. The plurality of identity also ties in with Andrew Pickering’s concept of the dance of agency, which also influenced this work. In this series, the video artworks themselves will expose within the video frame my relationship with my mom through multiple approaches. This, in turn, will allow me to analyze our bond with increased awareness and bear before the audience the question of what role mothers play both on an individual level and on a greater societal scale.

Part 1: Cognitive Connection

In Part One of Mamá Mía titled “Cognitive Connection”, Henriquez and her mother play a game where they have to say the same word at the same time without any context clues. Usually, the game would end when both players say the same word. However, in this video, the artist and her mom continue playing until they mentally cannot form any more words. The act of guessing what the other person will say based on relational knowledge and pure instinct pushes the boundaries of how well each know the other, revealing the degree of cognitive connection in the mother-daughter bond. As the game continues, Henriquez and her mother also begin to understand each other better as they successfully predict what associations the other might be making depending on the preceding words in a given round.

Part 2: Cosquí

In Part Two of Mamá Mía titled “Cosquí”, Henriquez recreates a common action from her childhood as a grown adult. In Spanish, the word “cosquilla” literally means “tickle”, but it also refers to the action of caressing someone, often done by mothers to their children. As a young girl, Henriquez had a habit of shortening the word to “cosquí”, which she would ask her mother to do as she rested her head on her mother’s lap. Now, having grown, Henriquez attempts to return to those moments that formed the core of her relationship with her mother.

Part 3: Lingua Franca

A lingua franca refers to a language that is used for communication between speakers whose native languages are different. “Lingua Franca” examines the relationship between language, culture, and perceived identity through the Cuban diaspora in the United States. In the fashion of Gillian Wearing’s “2 into 1”, the artist and her mother become reflections of each other by lip syncing to each other’s voices discussing their experiences related to bilingualism. Both mother and daughter speak their respective native tongues in the voiceovers, but they switch places as they move their lips to the sounds of their counterpart’s voice. They effectively become a new entity of shared understanding crossing cultural boundaries and highlighting the effects of immigration within the domestic sphere. Thus, the piece itself becomes a lingua franca for communication between mother and daughter as well as between the artist and the viewer.

Part 4: En el baúl de los recuerdos

In Part Four of Mamá Mía titled “En el baúl de los recuerdos”, which loosely translates to “In the trunk of memories”, the artist and her mother examine the objects that were literally contained in a plastic storage bin. As they go through each object, they recount the memories associated with them, telling the story of Henriquez’ childhood from both her eyes and those of her mother.

Part 5: The Musical

In Part Five of Mamá Mía titled “The Musical”, the overarching title of this body of work comes full circle as Henriquez and her mother sing and dance to selected songs from the Mamma Mia: The Musical soundtrack. The music is played from a micro SD card purchased years in the past by the artist’s mother as a nod to the days when mother and daughter would jam out to the CD while at home. They start off a bit stiff, ease into the groove, reach an emotional climax, and end with a bang in true karaoke fashion. It’s a home-video-meets-performance synthesis exposing the intimate moments that connect a parent with their child.