Roots

2004

performance

For a number of years, I have collected letters that allude to my ancestry in a small fishing village on the coast of my native home. The delivery of the letters is in all probability owing to a clerical error because I have no namesake at all and no connection to this village. In these letters, I am encouraged to commemorate my background and treasure this kinship with fellow villagers on special occasions. This collection of letters triggered a week long performance where I would attempt to rediscover my roots and myself in the process. The whole endeavour was to be based on this liberating misunderstanding. Soon I found myself on a bus, heading towards the source of this misplaced identity with only my camera and the eight frames left on the negative to document my discovery.

A storm was brewing as the bus left the city. It continued to grow stronger as we drove and it was dark by the time I reached the village. I got a room in a guesthouse. It was run by an old lady in her home and she set me up in her son’s old bedroom. I had coffee with her and carefully avoided any reference to my visit in our conversation as it began to dawn on me that I had no idea what I was doing there. The following week I was to be presented with similar situations of profound awkwardness time and time again. I woke up the next day to a full force gale, still clueless but quite content with the notion that the work and myself where going absolutely nowhere. The next days where spent wandering aimlessly around the village in the screaming weather under the gaze of the locals, shifting their curtains as I went by and probably wondering what I was doing there, just like me. Every now and then I would pick up my camera and attempt to capture the awkward nature of this venture - failing every time. A week passed and I decided to leave. On arriving back home I had the negative developed and looking at the images I had a vague notion of having been someone else-somewhere else.