Pa’ Frida Interactive Installation - A Filtered Legacy

In an age defined by advanced technologies like AI generation and 3D printing, John Berger’s declaration that “seeing is believing” feels outdated. Now, it’s about more than just seeing—it’s about manipulating, filtering, and reducing the whole into curated fragments of identity for the world to consume.

Pa’ Frida (Para Frida Kahlo) confronts this modern reality through a 3D-printed interactive installation that reimagines Frida Kahlo and her Casa Azul garden—not as a celebration of her full humanity but as a mosaic of superficial beauty and commodified identity. Instead of presenting Frida’s complex story—her pain, sorrow, passion, and extraordinary talent—this installation deliberately fractures her essence, focusing solely on the aesthetic, the iconic, the digestible.

Through fragmented pieces of Frida’s imagery, Pa’ Frida highlights our collective obsession with vicariously living through icons while simultaneously stripping them of their depth. We manipulate, filter, and piece together different versions of her, not to honor who she truly was but to project who we want her to be. This work doesn’t shy away from the unsettling truth: in this process, we lose Frida, the woman, entirely.

She would hate what she has become—a symbol co-opted, stripped of her raw, unvarnished self. Pa’ Frida invites audiences to grapple with this uncomfortable reality, urging reflection on how we consume and reinterpret cultural icons in an era where technology allows us to reshape everything but seldom reveals the truth.