During her CCI + WOPHA Fellowship, Claudia Claremi will expand her ongoing series La memoria de las frutas (The Memory of Fruits), a large-scale research-based project exploring the sensory and emotional bonds people have with fruit. In this new chapter of the project, she will focus on members of the Caribbean migrant communities in Miami and their personal memories of Caribbean fruits. Using black-and-white 16mm film and 35mm photography to capture the empty hands of participants—who gesture as they describe the different fruits they remember—and text fragments derived from their oral testimonies, she sheds light on the larger impact of industrial agriculture in the Caribbean, the migratory pathways of fruit and of humans, the diminishing presence of fruit trees in Caribbean yards and streets, and the challenges Caribbean people face in accessing fruit that was once plentiful. Once complete, La memoria de las frutas will form a collective narration of the structural causes of this cultural disconnection and oblivion while, in the process, restoring individual histories and honoring the fruits associated with them.

Claudia Claremi is an artist and filmmaker. Her work combines video, analog film, photography, installation, sound, and text. She graduated from the International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños (Cuba) and the University of the Arts London. Claremi has been an artist in residence at Beta-Local (San Juan, PR), Centre for Artists in Residence at Matadero Madrid Centre for Contemporary Creation, Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester, NY), and The Clemente (New York). Her films have been screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Raindance Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and Guadalajara International Film Festival, and her work has been shown at the Center for Visual Art at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Haus de Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Museo CA2M (Madrid), and Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), among others. 

The 2024 CCI + WOPHA Fellowship is presented by PAMM’s Caribbean Cultural Institute in collaboration with Women Photographers International Archive and the support of El Espacio 23.