Guiding The Night
This series focuses on migration, displacement, memory and identity, working off a transcript from my own family archive. The document details the journey made by my Polish-Jewish grandfather across the Pyrenees mountains to escape Nazi Europe. Resituating myself in the same dark and liminal terrain, reactivating a memory I have no grasp of, this work explores imagined landscapes and imagined histories, and how these relate in a wider sense to shifting territories, nation states and the experience of individuals within them.
“It is ambiguity, not certainty, that poses a threat to our convictions and forces us into harder positions. But it is ambiguity that can – and should be – a provocation to thought.” - Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge
“Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night
we drink and drink
we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie...” - Paul Celan, Todesfuge (Death Fugue)
