Earlier this year, 2025 Mohn LAND Grant recipient Susan Aparicio debuted her installation Millions of Dreams Ago at the UCLA Planetarium. The multi-media installation brings together stained-glass sculptures and video, using the unique projecting capabilities of the planetarium to draw together narratives of familiar ties, memory, cosmic time, and diaspora.
A series of star-shaped stained-glass sculptures mirrored projected video onto the ceiling of the UCLA Planetarium, creating a constellation of moving images on the domed ceiling. The star-shaped projections are comprised of digitized home recordings of Aparicioâs family made between 1995 and 2005. During that period, her parents, aunts, and uncles were undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America, just beginning their lives in Los Angeles, specifically southeast LA, and living in apartments in Bell, CA.
The projected video involves abstract glimpses into that timeâparties, funerals, jokes, arguments, and their daily life and wonders. Aparicio brings these moments together to create a complex but intimate view of her familyâs experience as young immigrants in Los Angeles.
Astrid Kayembe, LAND Operations Coordinator, sat down with Susan to discuss her process, the beginnings of Millions of Dreams Ago, and what it means to go through archival family material.
Astrid Kayembe: What got you started in working with glass?
Susan Aparicio: My process has always changed a lot, and I actually started working, initially, in glass for a video installation. I wanted to learn how to cut mirror glass, since I learned that mirrors are just glass with a silver coating. I was working primarily in video installation at the time, so I was just playing with video bouncing off a mirror and projecting it into a space. It worked really well. I learned that you can cut the mirror into different shapes, it doesn't have to just be a square mirror. That's when I got started. I took a glass workshop after that because I wanted to learn how to actually cut glass into shapes and forms. That's what got me startedâhaving an idea for the video installation, and then using mirror and glass as a method to play with light. Since then, I grew my glass practice more, then my video practice. In this installation, they're together again. It's the same as how I first started, but now it's a much more finessed or more mature use of it. Because when I first did it, it was very rough.
AK: I could imagine. The science and math that goes behind it is so fascinating. Tell me about the conception of this project.
SA: Itâs a continuation of a solo show [Stellar Remnants at LaPau Gallery] that I had in 2023, and that project was in a similar form, but it was in a small gallery, so it was star sculptures with the mirror on top to reflect video into the gallery ceiling. The form was very similar, but the content was a little different. The show was titled Stellar Remnants, which is the scientific termâafter a star dies, it turns into a stellar remnant. The remnant of that star is either a black hole or a white dwarf or neutron star. I was processing both my grandmothersâ passing at the timeâthey both passed within a year of each other. One of my grandmas passed away from COVID, and then the other one passed away the next year from a stroke.
During the COVID pandemic, I also started digitizing my family's home videos, and those are the same tapes that I also use in this project. I had the time, and I was with my family a lot. We had our own little pod. The videos really helped later in processing their passing. We had all this footage of funeral processions from within our family that they had documented in these tapes, so it was playing with their passing linked to the passing that also happens in the cosmos, the stars passing, and how they transform into something else and live on in light. This show is a continuation from that, not fixed on passing, but still fixed on our current memories, and living on in these forms of light. One day, everyone in those videos will have passed away, including myself. I still think of it as a part of that show where these people have passed away, and they're just living on as light now, but we just haven't gotten there yet, thankfully. Itâs all related conceptually: stars feeling somewhat more eternal, having these larger lives and our small life on Earth.
AK: Were you close with your grandmothers? What were they like?
SA: I was definitely close with my mom's mom. I was actually named after her but more Americanized. Her name was Susana. She's from Honduras. She actually was on a visa where she would live in the US for six months and live in Honduras for six months. Every time she would be here, she would live in Bell, which is nearby where my family lives in Pico Rivera. There were these moments of closeness, eating with her and being at the house with her, but then she would go away because she really loved Honduras and her friends back there too. My Mexican grandmother, my dad's mom, she only lived in Mexico. We would only see her maybe once a year. She was also a more distant mother. She was very strict and very tough, but she was also just such a strong mother figure. Both of my grandmothers had eight children. They became the matriarchs because both my grandfathers passed away before I was born. It was my grandmothers, both of them, who raised the whole family, and the grandchildren.
AK: It's very much the same in my family. Tell me a little bit about some of the videos that you chose to include in the project.
SA: There's definitely a mix. One has one of my grandmas in it. They were just sitting around the table making tamales, probably around holiday time, and everyone's talking really loud and yelling about some random family story. Another one that my family captured was my dad and my uncle singing together, but also trying to get each other to do a grito. There's a scene where I'm a kid in my Barney costume. My family used to spend time in San Pedro, and that's in the videos. They would go down to the water too and go through the tide pools to look for little crabs and stuff.
AK: Any surprises you came across when going through these?
SA: Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's weird because, almost all of it was surprising, because the tapes are from the 90s and 2000s and I was a child. It's me from barely being born to me being maybe eight at the latest, but I'm just a child for most of it. A lot of it is stuff I really don't remember. My parents, my aunts and uncles are all in their 20s or early 30s. They're just being themselves. They're not worried about what they look like. No one else is even filming. Only my dad's filming. They're just so young, and also very young parents, figuring out living together. They all lived together in an apartment complex, so we were always all together. We were just all physically close. Itâs interesting to see their interactions, because that has since changed. People have moved further apart. One thing that I didn't realize is how close all my uncles and my dad were. My dad would film their late nights having beers out on a patio, singing together, and joking, roasting each other. From my memory, they don't talk much now. My uncles who were a bit younger than my dad seemed to look up to him as an older figure, because also, they were away from Honduras, they were younger immigrants, and my dad was a little older.
My aunts seemed like they were figuring a lot of stuff out. One scene that's in the videos is one of my aunts arguing with another aunt because all of them left Honduras, and she was saying something, like âWe all don't know how our mom is doing, because we're all here and she's over there.â They're arguing about what they chose to do, which was to leave her and come to the US. My dad was filming these very personal conversations, and it was crazy. I could see these struggles and relationships differently from these tapes. I definitely see them as more relatable, more human.
AK: Have you spoken with your dad about why he was the family documentarian, or why he felt that was important? Or if he was having fun with the camera?
SA: Yeah, my dad's only mentioned that he thinks it's important to record it. At the time, he said that he was recording it because they would send the tapes to Mexico and Honduras with someone who was traveling. So the family members there could see what their life was like in the US, for those who couldn't travel. It was somewhat more informative. Some of the videos would be little messages to those watching. My dad, to this day, doesn't have much shame. I don't know if it sounds worse in English, but he's not very shameful about filming personal things. Because even today he films with his phone. I definitely think, in another life, he could be like a journalist or something, because it feels like he needs to record and document something for the future.
AK: It feels like youâre under the same stars and share that experience through this medium. Thereâs a phrase that comes up in the description of the project: cosmic time. What does that mean to you?
SA: I got this sensation while I was watching the videos, and other people kind of felt this too. I'm making this work in the present, but it has a quality of being from a very distant past and a very different time. The videos are from over 20 years ago, 25 years ago, but they have an almost ancient feeling. I imagine people could happen upon these videos in 100 years or something. It makes me feel a more cosmic feeling, like it's so much greater than just my present time. It's thinking of the universe and the stars and the stories that the stars tell in a very large sense of time. Thatâs what it makes me feel. When stars die, the light that they shine is from millions of years ago. It's not the light they're currently shining. Light from the past is what we see, so the videos, that's light from the past as well. Even though it's our present, because of the universe and the scale of the universe, time works differently.
AK: How many video clips are there?
SA: It's about 60 tapes, and each one is about two hours. Itâs hours and hours of footage. And when I watch these, I just like, have been pulling these, 10 seconds here, 20 seconds here, clips.
AK: My favorite was the one with the cockroach.
SA: Ah, yeah, that was funny. So silly. [My dad] is saying jokes in Spanish so over the video, he says, because they're screaming and stuff, âI don't know why you're screaming. We have bigger ones at the house.â
AK: So youâre sort of processing your grief through the Stellar Remnants project and this project. How is it shaping the ways that you make new memories with your family and even in your own marriage with Peter?
SA: I'm thinking a lot more about how I'm documenting my current life and what I'm choosing to document. I don't know if I'm documenting enough because I think I'm so tired of the screen and the phone. I sometimes feel like refusing to document my own life. Iâm so in the moment. When I watch my family's videos, itâs really nice to see moments that are a normal life. Other than birthdays or Christmas, itâs nice to see what the average day was like. To see interactions between other family members, like my grandmas, just to see what was a normal life with them versus a special occasion. The normal daysâI appreciate when I could see those more, because they fade away into memory more than special occasions, at least for me. So that makes me actually want to document more, and using this kind of older form of documentation more than social media.
AK: Did you digitize the videos yourself?
SA: It's really expensive to do it in a place if you have a lot of tapes, so when my dad pulled out the box, I said I'll just figure it out. It just took a long time. I had my laptop running during the day. I had no deadline for this. It was just to do it. It took a month to do all of them, at my own pace.
It's really good that now they're all digitized because the tapes degrade depending on what environment they're in. So it's good to digitize them sooner than later. And also now Iâve got much more into storage and hard drive storage. I just store everything. I don't want to delete things, and I just store everything, because everything's a record. It kind of changed how I was thinking of my digital files.
AK: I'm absolutely something of a digital hoarder myself. Wait. Could I ask you a really silly question? How many items are in your Photos app?
SA: It's like 19,000.
AK: Oh, I have 83,600.
SA: Oh, my God, that's crazy.
AK: Okay, my bad. I thought we were in the same arena.
SA: Yeah thatâs a lot.
AK: Do you ever get paranoid about losing things? Living in Pasadena with the fires earlier this year, how do you feel about keeping your archive safe and what was that experience like for you?
SA: When we had the fires, we did think about it and had to plan for it. I needed my laptop. I needed my hard drive. Plus, a bin of printed family photos from the 2000s. I've been in a slow process of wanting to digitize them. What do we really need? It's the stuff we really can't replace. So it was all just memory related, personal memories, and very valuable things. I don't like to delete things. I don't want to lose anything, because I never know when I'll need something. I'm definitely much more of a digital hoarder. In person, I'm less attached to my personal belongings.
I also watch sci-fi, like Star Trek, and there's some episodes of being like âThese people left a record of themselves,â and finding out about culture from this person, because 1,000 years ago they left the record. I also think about records as what's called the âcredibility of existence,â because I think of the stories of the Mayans and how records of their culture got destroyed. It just gets taken over by imposing what other people think their culture was about, like theories about aliens and stuff. I think it's important to have a strong record, and along with that, a record of one's culture.
AK: What are some of those memories that you'd like to keep of Susan, today?
SA: It was nice having my family and getting together, just to hang out. One thing that we do is watch music videos. And then that music video run usually evolves into karaoke. I grew up with my family being a karaoke family. We're not shy at all about performing with each other and being really expressive. We do duetsâthose are really special. It doesn't work out every weekend, so it's kind of nice when we can, if it's a good day and it's nice outside to have some skewers outside on the barbecue and then just hang out and do karaoke. That's one of my favorite times for us to get together.
AK: Anything else youâd like to share?
SA: One that I didn't realize until people started watching and responding to [the project]âit made people really emotional. From that point in time â late 90s, early 2000s â itâs now 25 years in the future. I feel almost bittersweet. Itâs honestly kind of sad to relive these memories, because I know where it goes in the future. Itâs a really tense time right now, and with all of the ICE raids happening, it adds this current tension to watching something that is so new and so young and so alive. My family had just come to Los Angeles, and now, 25 years later, my family is very much planning to leave Los Angeles.
Itâs very weird that it's almost a full circle to have my family watch the videos, too. When they were watching the screening, they really loved it, but it also has a feeling that the times are changing. It's reviewing something that was, and no longer is. Everyone's lives are so different. It comes across as maybe a joyous screening, but I think it's also something a little bit darker. The title being Millions of Dreams Ago: this is a very ancient past, and thinking of a very different future. Itâs almost a little haunted, a little ghostly. It's just kind of crazy because some of those people were deported, some of those people passed away, some people are not close anymore.
I see where that went, and itâs very emotional to experience that kind of change. Itâs a very special piece for me.
Photos by Gina Clyne.