Uprooted Fresco

The image should produce the gut-feeling of watching something alive being separated from its roots — not destroyed, but uprooted in a way that changes its meaning forever. The viewer should feel the phantom ache of a wall where a painting once hung, the way an amputee feels a missing limb. This draws on the strappo technique in fresco conservation — the literal act of peeling painted plaster from architecture — as both method and metaphor, informed by the Mexican muralist tradition where art was inseparable from the building, the neighborhood, the nation.