2024-Ongoing
On Christmas Eve my father and I take a plane from Lima, to Chiclayo, Peru. Prior to this trip, the most time we’d ever spent together was for 72 hrs just a few months before. While in Chiclayo, we knock on doors. We asked shop owners, and pedestrians, if anyone knows anyone by the name of ______. A man tending to his motorcycle yells out to us in Spanish, ‘who are you looking for?’ My father gives a description. The mans says he thinks the place that we’re looking for is down the block, and across the street. ‘Look for the black door’, he says. Finally, we arrive at our destination. My father knocks on the door. A man answers:
In Spanish, my father says, ‘Hello, ______ I am your brother ______ and this is your niece from the United States. The man says, ‘Hello brother! Hello Niece! Can you come back in 30 minutes?’
We take a walk and return.
‘Why did you come?’, he asks.
I tell him, ‘I want to know where I come from.’ With ink stained hands, my uncle draws a diagram. My uncle is a printmaker. He tells me that it’s a family business, originally started by my great uncles. He draws me maps and timelines. In Spanish he says, “we come from ‘Negro, (black,) Indio, (original people) Moche/Mochica, and Inkas from the high Andes.” Then he explains to me how the Moche became the Chimu, and the Chimu became Lambayeque.
Next, he tells me that he is a time traveller. He says that when he went to see an exhibition of a Mochica mummy, El Señor de Sipán/The Lord of Sipan; He looked into the lord’s scepter, and went into a trance. When he came to, everyone in the museum was standing around him clapping. He says he travelled back in time, and lived with the Moche for a lifetime. But when he came back, his brother said that he had only been gone for 30 minutes. He also told me about the 5th element. He says that everyone thinks it’s love, but really, it’s loss. And that meditation can be a doorway to time travel.
I show him my prints and tell him that art, and history also allow us to bend time, and space.
Together we go through family photos, rephotographing old photographs, building a bridge across time.
And then I tell him that I feel deeply connected to him, even though we’ve only just met.
This series of photos was made using hybrid photography. Each photo started out as live animated digital captured by cellphone, and then turned into a still analog/instant print, by using a hybrid camera. Using magnets they were installed and documented on a false wall in the back of the basement of my last apartment where no one could see them. As I write about these photos/build my website, I learn things. Like how the bees at Paseo Yortuque attacked school children. And how the young artist Mia Caro passed away the same month I took a photo of her artwork.
Where does it come from? Where does it go back to? Where do I come from? Where am I growong, do I grow back to?
Family Photo Eye Roll