Maps

This project, shot on a tiny IR camera in Brasil and edited during a long immigration process in the USA, is both a longing for and visualization of home; a lesson in learning to re-define the term itself.

This project, shot on a tiny IR camera in Brasil and edited during a long immigration process in the USA, is both a longing for and visualization of home; a lesson in learning to re-define the term itself. The disorienting intensity of the images is a reflection of the atrocities I had become accustom to witnessing while working with marginalized populations. The static is representative of acculturation; those days when it feels like you’re nowhere and everywhere at the same time, when you question reality itself. Initially my computer could not load the files and they became corrupted with lines that felt much like my own attempts to process trauma. This became a theme of the series, although the alteration was intentionally added. The route we drove across Brasil on this journey to plant roots in Recife where our first home would be open, is the same route over which thousands of women and children are transported across the country. Hidden in trucks and busses, sold at stops and brothels like cargo. In a small way I like to believe we began re-writing history along this road, what is currently a pathway to hell will become a map to freedom. What I found along this interstate, buried within the deafening silence of war torn lives, were moments of beauty with which I could not argue, a landscape of promise completely outside my wildest imagination.