Where Are You Local?

A project about displacement, identity and belonging, exploring the strange freedom of trying on lives that are not yours. Through pet-sitting and temporarily inhabiting other people’s homes, I ask: who might I have been, had I been placed differently?

Immigration returned me to a state of childhood — everything unfamiliar, the same helplessness, except now you are your own parent. In this new and unfamiliar state, I began to think about displacement, identity and belonging through something very intimate: the experience of temporarily inhabiting other people’s homes.

After moving to another country, I found myself rebuilding my life from fragments of old desires and memories. Scents returned first: freshly cut grass, a pond with water lilies, a forest after rain. Memories I had not touched in decades arrived unbidden in a city that was not mine. They felt like directions — back toward something true.

For years, I had shaped myself around other people’s projects, deadlines and definitions of what mattered. Stripped of all that, I had to ask: what had I actually wanted, before I learned to want the right things?

The answer was unexpectedly simple: a dog. A childhood dream I had never allowed myself. I could not have one of my own, but I could be near one. I started pet-sitting.

Living temporarily in other people’s homes, I began inhabiting spaces that were not mine, yet deeply personal to those who lived there. I slept in their rooms, moved through their routines and became a temporary part of their domestic worlds.

In former nurseries, I imagined other childhoods. In homes where couples were quietly building a future together — moving in, marrying, preparing for a child — I found myself imagining the lives I might have lived, and wondering what it would feel like to know what comes next.

What began as a way to be close to a childhood dream became a way of looking at my own life from the outside. The project is about the strange freedom of trying on lives that are not yours — and the question that follows: who might I have been, had I been placed differently?

I would not have been able to ask that question had I stayed where I began.