A Real Home From Home

A woman from Mexico builds a collage where two countries meet as equals: the papel picado, pottery, and food of her homeland alongside the stone and sea of Cyprus. Under the word WELCOME and the phrase she chose for the whole piece, Thalia tells a story not of leaving one home for another, but of finding a second home that honours the first.

STORIES FROM CYPRUS

6/15/20262 min read

That word, WELCOME, runs across the top in large letters, and it carries the whole meaning of the piece. Cyprus welcomed her. And in return she has made a work that welcomes Cyprus into her Mexican world, and her Mexican world into Cyprus. A real home from home is not a replacement. It is an addition. A second belonging laid gently over the first, so that nothing is lost and something new is gained.

Thalia's collage is, in the end, an act of gratitude and of pride at once. Pride in where she comes from, gratitude for where she has landed, and the quiet confidence of a woman who has discovered that you can carry your whole heritage across an ocean and still find a place that says, simply, welcome.

She titled it before she explained it. A Real Home From Home. The phrase sits quietly in the centre of her collage, and everything around it works to prove it true.

Look at what she gathered. Across the top, papel picado, the perforated paper banners that are one of Mexico's most beloved folk crafts, cut into lace by hand and strung across streets for celebrations. Below and around, the abundance of a Mexican table: peppers and tomatoes and onions, the copper pot, the clay vessels turned on a wheel and fired in the old way. There is an elderly woman seated among it all, the grandmother figure who carries tradition in her hands and passes it forward. And there, spelled out in bold letters laid across a feast, the name of her country: MEXICO.

These are not decorations. They are intangible cultural heritage, the living traditions UNESCO recognises precisely because they survive in practice rather than in museums. Mexican cuisine, with its ancient techniques and communal rituals. The folk art of papel picado. The pottery passed from one generation of hands to the next. When Thalia places these at the heart of her work, she is keeping them alive, declaring that they travelled with her and did not stay behind.

But the collage is not only Mexico. Woven through it is Cyprus: the honey-coloured stone of a coastal castle, the blue of the Mediterranean, the cactus and prickly pear that grow in both her old country and her new one, a small green bridge between two warm and sun-drenched worlds. She does not set the two places against each other. She lets them sit side by side, sharing the same page, the same light, the same sense of welcome.

HERS

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