Diana Guerra works in the space between homeland and displacement. Using conventional and alternative photographic processes alongside filmmaking, she constructs a third space — somewhere in the middle — where the cultural and social complexities of Latine immigrant communities in New York City can be visualized and expressed. Her central questions are intimate and structural at once: how do immigrants grieve the loss of their identities, and how do they rebuild them? Does that rebuilding move in a straight line, or does it fold across time and space?

Her ongoing series Fleeting Under Light approaches these questions through the anthotype process — prints made using photosensitive materials derived from plants. For this work, she uses Peruvian purple corn, beet, and red cabbage: unstable materials that fade over time, especially under sunlight. Purple corn has been cultivated in the South American Andes for at least 2,500 years, sacred in pre-Hispanic Peruvian history and known as oro in Spanish, sara or kulli sara in Quechua. These works mark the first instance of purple corn being used as a photographic emulsion.

The images draw from her personal archive and new photographs made in collaboration with family members in La Arena, Peru, and in New York. Through sun exposure and photo degradation, the works carry traces of memory — inscribing a unique history in the present. The act of performing these exposures in a new land is a deliberate gesture: a claim on the right to create and preserve personal and collective histories, and a challenge to the systematic erasure of indigenous communities of color in the United States.