Похожий по смыслу проект — Backra Bluid.
«I am My Family features digitally altered self-portrait photographs. reproduc tions of pages from an artist‘s book. and ephemera from genealogical research. It is the result of a longing for connection with a long-gone family, as well as as of a process of assembling an identity out of fragments of familial histories left behind by the wars and migrations of the 20th century while acknowledging the impossibility of complete retrieval.The self-portrait photographs in IAm My Family are detailed re-enaCtments of ancestral figures that can be understood as acts of naming linked to mourning and remembrance.
In re-enacting familial others through genetic resemblance. and through the conventions of the portrait photograph. these self-portraits suggest that we look at family photographs in order to know ourselves through the photographic trace left by our lost ancestors.
I am My Family started many years ago when my son was a child.l realized that the role of parent included the responsibility of passing on to him a familial and cultural inheritance. I thought of all that was lost and will never be known of my family history. and of the way in which education (South
American and jewish in my case) privileges public rather than personal histories. While I could access the considerable existing stores of knowledge of Eastern European jewish life. knowledge of the pre-Holocaust lives of my grandparents and their families are lost forever with the passing of the last
elderly relatives who knew them.These images are the result of a reconstructive process that acknowledges its own limitations. in that the construction of an image of the past unavoidably involves a mixture of fragmentary memory and imagination. and that this mixture evolves as it is transmitted from generation to generation.»
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