Highway 27: In Search of my Eudaimonia
The death of my mother in 2021 marked a rupture that altered my sense of orientation. In 2022, during my twenty-seventh year living in the United States, the country where I have spent most of my adult life, I turned to Highway 27 as a structure for reflection. The number 27, my birth date and the years since arriving here, became both temporal marker and conceptual device.
Highway 27 begins in Miami and extends north through Florida’s rural interior, ending near a town named Havana at the Georgia border. The journey traces a quiet axis between two Havanas, one remembered, one geographically encountered, transforming coincidence into meditation.
The photographic tradition of the highway is deeply woven into American visual culture. In Open Road, a seminal anthology edited by David Campany, the road functions as a symbol of myth, freedom, restlessness, and collective aspiration. In dialogue with this lineage, Highway 27 shifts the emphasis from mobility as myth to movement as meditation. Here the road is not a metaphor for escape or spectacle, but a spatial instrument for self-inquiry.
Drawing from the classical notion of eudaimonia, fulfillment through alignment with one’s inner purpose, the landscape becomes psychological terrain. The horizon functions as threshold; distance becomes measure; silence becomes method. Rather than narrating travel, the images examine orientation: how identity stabilizes over time, how solitude clarifies direction, and how belonging is constructed through lived permanence rather than return.
This project deliberately avoids framing my migration as exile. The United States is my home, my country, and the road became a tool to reflect on identity, permanence, and belonging rather than longing or return.
Highway 27 situates the road itself as protagonist, a witness to transformation, a companion in contemplation, and a frame through which the landscape becomes a mirror of interior becoming. The project also honors my mother, acknowledging how her presence continues to guide and inspire reflection during this personal and artistic journey.
The series operates within a contemporary art framework, employing composition, rhythm, and sequencing to construct a visual meditation on memory, solitude, and introspection.
A mi “Estrellita viajera”, sé que algo de ti me acompaña siempre…
