WHERE I LIVED

                                                                                                                                Alex and Aly

Where I Lived started from an intimate place. I was going through a period where I felt though I had many homes, I was homeless. This prompted me to think more about the notion of home, and what it meant to me. 

I started taking photos of a nursing home, and thinking about aloneness and aging in relation to home, and then going even further to take pictures of houses. The act of taking photos of someone's house is very voyeuristic and I felt the negatives of that; I felt like an intruder.  But the reality of it is, I simply wanted to belong. 

I've always felt like a lost soul because though I have and continue to navigate all these different spaces, the person I thought I knew is slowly becoming nothing but a false memory.

I wanted to visit the place where the memories of this false self was created. But I didn't realize how much of a stranger I would feel like. This home was no longer mine, and I was no longer the person it once knew. But with fresh eyes I saw myself, and I found a new home within myself.  

The process of working with all the footage from the time I was in Jamaica wasn't an easy one. The project became more reflective, and certain parts became more intimate and hard to work with. I took many a breaks which helped me see the project differently over time. The film became it's own thing, and the photos became something completely different. I made a book for the photos, called Where I Lived, so I could engage with them more intimately and reflectively. It is more incomplete than the film, but I'm still working on it like everything else in my life.