What is this home that is home that is not home

The restrictions of freedom of movements and confinement enforced during the pandemic brought me to reaffirm my ethical commitments and nourish spiritual detachment. My inner monologues became louder and the endless stream of thoughts in my forever-seeking mind, busier. Questions were raised, and answers turned into more interrogations. The truth is that we all have been forced to look at ourselves and our intimate spaces and environments, and to consider our feelings of pleasure, complacency, fear and loss.

Between the need to be held and touched and the need for more breathing room amid a respiratory-based viral pandemic, I found comfort and kinship in the creative practices of my peers, and solace in my friends’ utterances and thread of thoughts. Collective virtual activations and community-based initiatives acted as anchors during this time of self-reflection and introspection.

This past August, as I turned 24 I brought forth What is this home that is home that is not home with the help of my peers. This photographic collection was inspired by the text We Solicit the darkness (from my virtual residency with Mice magazine, Little Musings) by the brilliant Anique Jordan and Liz Ikiriko, and the culmination of my questionings about my cross-cultural African-European identities and my sense of (be)longing to the land.

How are bipoc's sense of (be)longing and personhood shaped by their relationship to the land? What do these relationships look like and how can it be visually translated?

What connects us to our lineages? Makes things more tangible?

These are only a few interrogations that led me to reflect on the multiple ways I can/want to contribute to the mémoire collective, without perpetuating my traumas.

How can I create more intentionally? What is my legacy?

And ultimately, what is home? How does it feel / look / smell like?

What is this home that is home that is not home explores senses of belonging in relation to our own bodies’ positionality to land and family. It highlights the journey towards realizing that our bodies act as mnemonic agents in how we relate to places wherein our ancestors lived. Travelling from one place to another, what connects locations is what lives within us — the simultaneity of time. How can our bodies tell the stories of those places that have delineated the ways we relate to the past to be present in the now, as we dream up better possibilities for (be)longing.

This first visual story is the introductory photographic element to a long-term multi-media and research project exploring the repressed and unsure ways in which we create affinities within the world around us, within the black diaspora, and the complexities this entails.