"The paradox of the pocket" by Joni Barberi

"The paradox of the pocket" emerged from an emotional encounter between me and the visual artist Franziska Windolf in July 2026 in Buenos Aires. We exchanged different family experiences related to migration, territory, and memory. We visited Parque Lezama in the southern part of the city, a space that served as our meeting point to talk and get to know one another. We explored the National Historical Museum on the same grounds and retraced part of the paths walked by enslaved individuals during the colonial era. The forced trafficking of African people to the port of Buenos Aires extended from the 17th century to the early 19th century. Captives were forced to give up their original names and take their owners' surnames. Today, local Afro-Argentine cultural groups and neighborhood drum ensembles celebrate the unyielding struggle for freedom, cultural resistance, and the recovery of identity every Sunday afternoon. As a trace of our encounter, we shared the ritual of drinking mate. I then repurposed the remaining yerba to intervene in "The paradox of the pocket", infusing the piece with a physical layer of commemoration and thoughts we uncovered through our conversations and the historical context of our meeting point. A paradox that characterized the immigrants who arrived in Argentina between 1860 and 1940, was that of the empty pockets: empty of money and economic resources, yet overflowing with dreams, trades, hopes, or seeds. Among them, more poetically, were my Italian and Uruguayan parents, who cast their roots deep into Buenos Aires and bore the fruit of three children. I physically sew the seeds of the Jacaranda, Ficus, and Phoenix palm from the park into the pocket, sealing it with red thread. Destined to migrate to Germany, and to open another migration circuit as part of “Meet the Memory Person” project, the piece honors my family’s experiences of relocating, and our connection as artists. Using a cyanotype process on the fabric associated with Argentinian school clothing, the worn pocket, emulsified and stained by yerba mate, now acts as a living archive: sunlight will reveal the botanical traces of the urban diaspora like a changing map of memory, held together by the thread that connects us and the stories we remember now in dialogue with our own.