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The Covid-19 pandemic–induced lockdown has forced many of us to retreat from outdoors, stay away from loved ones, cancel travels, sit down and revisit our memories – and sometimes, rethink our lives.
As an immigrant with family and friends scattered around the world, this uncertain climate and the sudden closing of borders made feelings of distance and nostalgia greater than they already were.
I interrogated my body of work and scanned through the many places and people I have visited and photographed so far. By transporting myself in there, through my process of image making, I might have found a novel way to travel, with my hands and memories.
Published in Period. Zine “Lost” Issue
The Covid-19 pandemic–induced lockdown has forced many of us to retreat from outdoors, stay away from loved ones, cancel travels, sit down and revisit our memories – and sometimes, rethink our lives.
As an immigrant with family and friends scattered around the world, this uncertain climate and the sudden closing of borders made feelings of distance and nostalgia greater than they already were.
I interrogated my body of work and scanned through the many places and people I have visited and photographed so far. By transporting myself in there, through my process of image making, I might have found a novel way to travel, with my hands and memories.
Published in Period. Zine “Lost” Issue
“Whenever I set off on any sort of journey I
fall off the radar. No one knows where I am.
At the point I departed from? Or at the point
I’m headed to? Can there be an in-between?
Am I like that lost day when you fly east, and
that regained night that comes from going
west? Am I subject to that much-lauded law
of quantum physics that states that a particle
may exist in two places at once? Or to a
different law that hasn’t been demonstrated
and that we haven’t even thought of yet that
says that you can doubly not exist in the
same place?
I think there are a lot of people like me.
Who aren’t around, who’ve disappeared. They show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigrations officers stamp their passport, or when the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their key. By now they must have become aware of their own instability and dependence upon places, times of day, on language or on a city and its atmosphere. Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness—these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized.”
Olga Tokarczuk - “Flights”
I think there are a lot of people like me.
Who aren’t around, who’ve disappeared. They show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigrations officers stamp their passport, or when the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their key. By now they must have become aware of their own instability and dependence upon places, times of day, on language or on a city and its atmosphere. Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness—these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized.”
Olga Tokarczuk - “Flights”