"We speak languages that are not our own
we walk around without passports or identity cards
we write desperate letters
that we do not send
we are numerous unfortunate intruders
survivors
survivors".

Cristina Peri Rossi

Do you know what Lima is like? It's a city with a grey roof nine months of the year. A belly-of-a-donkey sky. A concrete block. Where are the green trees or the sunshine? Where are the clear skies and the white clouds? Maybe that's why we run away from Lima, or is it the traffic, the noise, the sad wet pavements? Then we miss it, it's true. But why? Maybe because of a lady selling fruit, a neighbour who says hello in the morning, a grandmother reading the newspaper in the courtyard. Maybe because the streets of Lima are the only ones that lead us home.

"There are more trees here than in Lima", says Qorianka, as she contemplates the streets of Barcelona in spring. In Quechua, her name means golden eagle. She is eleven years old, has a Peruvian passport and the eyes of a newcomer. Her expressions and idioms are still intact. Will her accent ever change? What day will she start to adopt new words and start to forget others? What faces will begin to deform in her memory? How many voices will she not be able to recognise when the years have passed? In exchange for all this, will the city be less hostile to her? Will the day come when one of these streets will lead her to where she sits at home?

In a collaborative exercise, Boris Mercado and Qorianka use photography and audiovisuals to discuss identity in construction and the concerns surrounding migration. The portraits expose a Qorianka in contrast with the city she has just arrived in, but also in complicity and harmony with nature on this side of the Atlantic. These perspectives allow us to establish a story about the relationships, nostalgia, silences and conflicts of the migratory process. How much of ourselves, of our nature and origin, do we sacrifice in order to adapt to a new city?

Boris Mercado / Águila Dorada - Polysemies of silence

Collaboration: Qorianka Arcela, Alonso Mesía Macher, Mitmaq Ediciones, Camila Opazo Sepúlveda 

Production: Qorianka Arcela, Boris Mercado, Alonso Mesía Macher 

Image authorship: Qorianka Arcela y Boris Mercado 

Aknowledgements: Juliana Luna y Gaspar Justo 

"I am Boris Mercado, and as a migrant, much of my photography focuses on resistance and struggle in the face of injustice and on the diversity and cultural richness in the world.

"Since 2013 I have worked as a photojournalist in Peru. This approach has led me to become interested in issues that fall within the social hemisphere. At the same time, my photographic production has helped me to connect and collaborate with different projects in Latin America, South Africa and New Zealand, where I was able to broaden my horizons and work from the photographic language in spaces of cultural management, as a means of social transformation.

"I have published in magazines in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Italy, England, Portugal and Peru. And in 2014 I participated in the project Offside Brazil for MAGNUM Photos Agency in collaboration with the Midia NINJA Collective, in Brazil".