Ke sale teng – Reconstruction of a Family, a Trilogy

Ke sale teng, 2017. Film / Reconstruction of a family, 2016. Photo

Family photographs are more than just a documentation of events that have occurred, but space for us to project what we can recall and perhaps a space to question and invent a new history. Ke sale teng confronts how family photo albums no longer have a fixed narrative but instead open us to reinterpret our past and perhaps this kind of reinterpretation is an interrogation of our need to preserve a certain narrative. Photo albums are arranged as if to tell life stories and testimonies and build identities, however, the image is never ‘complete’ we are only presented with visual clues that allow our own imaginaries to further ‘complete’ the story.

The more I researched my family history, it becomes apparent that family history remains a space of contradictions, it is a mixture of truth and fiction. Sometimes we rely on the family photo album as a way to understand what family is meant to be. What we often land up with is a grouping of images that have been constructed, and perhaps do not account at all for the histories and memories that are connected with that album. Through the use of silhouette cutouts of family members and other props in a diorama, the film confronts the conflicting stories, which are told in multiple ways, even by the same person - memory combined with fantasy. Such archives do not reveal easy answers, for me they reveal that time can break apart and reconnect and not quite fit back into one another.