7 million people have left Venezuela since 2015, making it the second-largest external displacement crisis in the world. Cassandra Mayela’s ongoing project, Maps of Displacement seeks to draw attention to this crisis. Central to her work are the questions: what is it to be a migrant? Why should a person who leaves their home country be defined by their circumstances and why should free movement not be possible for everyone?

To create her large-scale tapestries, Cassandra collects garments from Venezuelan immigrants which she then cuts and weaves together. Each garment comes with a name, a face and a story. She collects data to build a picture of how people are moving around: where did they come from, where did they go, how old are they? She doesn’t record why they left - she wants the viewer to ask themselves “why are all these people leaving their home country?”

It’s important to Cassandra that Maps of Displacement is seen as a ‘work in progress’ because the subject of the series is an ongoing migratory crisis. However, with the cultural implication of this crisis in mind, she sees it more like regress than progress.

So what is gress?

Gress derives from gressus/gradus - indicating almost exclusively, movement.

In our second episode of Artist Shorts, we wanted to capture in each frame the sense of movement that is so important to Cassandra. The piece begins with overlapping voices of Venezuelans who entrusted her with their garments to weave their stories together into complex tapestries. She is cutting, always cutting, because the project, like the crisis, has no end in sight.