“I defend what I am, and I am not that strange.” — Pedro Lemebel

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Mutant Body is a visual essay that reflects on the human condition as an experience shaped by strangeness.

Difference becomes more evident when you arrive in foreign lands, when you do not speak the same language. In 1947, a wave of Ukrainian migrants arrived in Venezuela: “They came from the war to Puerto Cabello with burnt skin and crystal-colored eyes.”

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The photographs from my family archive—images of my Ukrainian relatives who fled the Second World War and arrived in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela—form the body of this narrative about difference, inheritance, and belonging.

In one of the family groups, someone shared a photograph altered with artificial intelligence. That gesture revealed to me that technology opens the possibility of reimagining the past, of reconstructing memory, of altering what we once believed to be fixed.

The intersection between images from the family album, staged photographs, and AI tools constructs a mutant and uncanny narrative. A narrative that thinks about difference not as a lack, nor as a threat, but as a way of recognizing ourselves: different, singular, unique like the stars to which we make wishes.

Our identity is not static. It transforms over time, incorporates layers, adapts, expands. To understand ourselves as bodies in constant mutation transforms the human experience and allows us to inhabit difference without fear. Being both migrant and queer placed me within difference, but it was also there that I learned how to name myself.