Everything I've Ever Loved

A multimedia autoethnography that considers Orange County, California's history of landholdings, subdivisions, conservatism, and underrepresented narratives through my lens as a mixed-race Chicana and a transracial adoptee.

'Monarch and cabbage white butterflies fluttering around as if they are weightless, as if the gravity of what surrounds them is not heavy, as if time disintegrates with flight.

I marvel at them and their aliveness.

They are not seemingly worn down by the history of conquest in the landscape.'

—from Stratagems (Orange County)

Everything I've Ever Loved explores autobiographical accounts of place, combined with broader social histories of Southern California, examining how location, place, and belonging shape racial imaginaries. The project maps how a veiled understanding of self, distinct to transracial adoption, and informed by place-based racism, can be contoured by regional politics and geography. My work features photographic negatives and archives from the 20th century, paired with the iconography of the Valencia orange, a symbol for Orange County's name and an emblem of migrant labor in its farmlands; these central images are contrasted by image-making from regional locations, parklands, coastlines, and neighborhoods that comment on the preservation of 'natural' land within the southernmost part of the County.

The visual language of print and lens-based media, as well as moving images, depicts soft, often obfuscated points of view, dislocating subjects and highlighting details of plant life and textures from Orange County's landscape—poetic gestures contrasted by text or subtitles presented within and alongside works on paper, photo essays, or video. Interdisciplinary in nature, the project sits between darkroom photography, alternative processes, print media, and analog and digital filmmaking: A still image from Super 8 film transposed as a lumen print; a lustrous silkscreen made with film scans mediated through Risograph; creative nonfiction writing used as a score for subtitles, hovering between video art, film essay, and experimental form. Everything I've Ever Loved meanders through the history of photography and media-making, expanding and contracting as a nuanced counter-narrative, slowly articulating how place shapes who we become.