AEDIS: on longing and LOSS

AEDIS - on longing and loss

In 2013, my 33 year old nephew, Salim was murdered, his body dumped in a ditch where it was discovered a couple days later. When I got the news I got on a flight home - my first trip since I left for America in 1996. Salim was the first grandchild, the first of the nephews and nieces, the first child of my first sibling. He left behind a wife, and two young daughters, and he brought me back to homeland and reunited me with my past.

My arrival home was like landing on a strange planet, populated with people who looked like me, knew my name, yet we were complete strangers collectively in mourning for a loved one whose face I had forgotten. I was once the outsider who never fit in when I left home, and now I had returned even more an outsider, but with deep longing for connection and familiarity. I found neither, yet I continue to return home, scouring the memories of family photos and staying in small shared spaces with my siblings, observing their closeness and camaraderie, and my distance from them.

AEDIS explores identity, migration and memory within my family unit, examining the imbalance of life as an immigrant in my home; America, and returning an immigrant in my homeland; Trinidad, and that struggle to reconcile where I belong. Underlying this work is an exhaustive and unfulfilled longing for connection and acceptance within country and family. The images are voyeuristic in nature, revealing my status there as the constant outsider, a stranger in a familiar place, looking for traces of self.