Pain No More

Between monochrome and color, pain and pleasure, time travel through the cracks of family albums and reality.

A major illness and several surgeries in my childhood left me with scars and memories of wounds. Those red-stained sheets and indelible bruises have long since become part of my body, integrating into my life. The pain transformed from a foreign experience into something symbiotic with my existence.

Three years later, with the end of the pandemic, I returned to my hometown and confronted familiar faces, only to find myself unable to speak of my past ordeal. Those dark days had become faint memories, almost as if they had never happened. What had we lost in silence? It no longer seems worth mentioning.

It was hard for me to reintegrate into life here, but perhaps it was an inner search for stability or some kind of attraction that brought me back to the building where I was born.

The former tenants had long since moved out, and the stains, footprints, and graffiti of the past 20 years had been covered up by renovations on the white walls. I also found my mom's photo albums, which captured my memories of being surrounded by illness and pain, and how I survived those difficult times.

Between the buildings and the albums, I look for traces of the past while searching for the path towards the future