BENJAMIN
I’m JC, London based Visual Artist, and this is my Personal Project Benjamin. Benjamin is my friend Patricia’s son. Patricia and her husband are first-generation Brazilian immigrants in London, but their son Benjamin was born in the UK. At home, they speak Portuguese, trying to keep their Brazilian culture and heritage alive. But Benjamin speaks Portuguese with a strong British accent, and when in Brazil, some of his relatives call him the “little Briton”. Patricia worries that Benjamin will never fully feel Brazilian.
When Patricia told me about her son’s potential identity crisis, I couldn’t help but feel completely related to his story. Throughout my life, my identity has often been defined by how others perceived me. Growing up in Panama, most people knew that I was from European descent even if they really didn’t know where in Europe was Catalonia located. When people asked me “where are you from?” and I responded saying “I’m from here, I’m Panamanian”, people would often ask me “yeah, but where are you and your family really from?”.
This experience repeated itself in other parts of the world where I’ve lived. In Barcelona, I wasn’t Catalan enough. I was always deemed as Latino or sometimes southern Spanish. In New York, I was Latino and, more specifically, Mexican. For the people who I met while living in France, I was Catalan from Barcelona. While in Sydney, I was from London. And now that I live in London, the majority of people see me as Catalan even though I always say that I was born in Panama.
After the question: “Where are you from?”, there is always an internal dialogue: “Where am I from?”. Like me, it’s in Benjamin’s hands to define his own identity.
