Rosalina Libertad Cerritos

Biography

Rosalina Libertad Cerritos is a Salvadoran-Canadian moving image artist and researcher. Her creative practice-based research revolves around activating and utilizing her cultural, ancestral and historical knowledge at the intersection of emerging digital technologies and art. She holds a BFA in Film Production from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University, with a focus on Experimental Cinema. In 2021, she completed an MFA at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She is currently in the first year of the Media & Design Innovation PhD program at Toronto Metropolitan University.

In her artistic research and studio practice she explores themes that navigate personal and collective experiences and histories and how these unfold through identity, culture, language, place, memory and intergenerational experiences of trauma, nostalgia, celebration and hope. These themes are expressed as personal allegory and symbolical narrative where digital moving image, sound and sculptural form embody and encompass the subliminal corners of her emotional creativity and imagination. Her practice is multi-dimensional and multi-sensorial. In her work she is exploring and imagining new narratives and new futures through a process and exercise of reconstruction, reconciliation and reconnection to her memories and history.

Residency Goals

During my time at the CRISP residency, I intend to produce a series of 3D models and prints. This production phase will be complemented by research into the Mesoamerican deity Kukulkan, through which I aim to explore connections between mythology, personal history, and digital form. I will investigate ways to meaningfully integrate this mythological figure with my archival childhood materials, weaving together ancestral symbolism and lived experience through sculptural and moving image practices.

Residency project

Kukulkan and The Cosmic Memory Box

This project engages with themes of immigration, displacement, land, memory, and Mesoamerican mythology. At its core is a personal archive: photographs and materials from my early childhood, captured in the first years after immigrating with my family from Mexico to Canada. These fragments - part document, part memory trace - serve as the foundation for an experimental work that seeks to reframe personal history within a broader cultural and diasporic context.

By integrating 3D modelling, 3D printing, and expanded digital moving image practices, I explore how these materials can be transformed into digital imprints, textural forms, and sculptural surfaces. This project examines how technology can be used not just as a tool of reproduction, but as a means of storytelling, mark-making, and emotional translation. Through these processes, the archive becomes a site of reconstruction - a way to reimagine identity, belonging, and the continuity of ancestral knowledge in the context of migration.

This work invites viewers into a multi-sensorial experience where memory becomes material and mythology is reactivated through form, texture, and movement. The installation will combine sculptural elements with moving image offering a space for reflection on cultural hybridity, fragmented histories, and the act of remembering.