Perhaps simply to capture that moment and to take it with me, which is what we often do when filming or photographing, to make moments immortal, to give ourselves the illusion that we are overcoming the passage of time.
I don’t know what exactly I was thinking at that moment, but very likely, when I happen to be back in my hometown, these kinds of questions come to mind very often, particularly in moments that lend themselves more to this kind of meditation, as it might be during a car trip.
I chose not to use sound, to allow the rhythm of the words to be heard, to be guided by it, to evoke a space of thought. When we are led to imagining or questioning, we isolate ourselves in our mental bubble and it seems that no sound out there captures our attention. Even images seem like a pretext, we pay no attention to them, they seem to be there just to follow the flow of our thoughts.
Nice post you’ve made.
When I’m camping in a tent, with my friends or my children, we go for big or small trips during the day. When we go back to the tent, everyone automatically says we are going “home” to the tent. If we stay overnight in a hotel, we will go «home” to the hotel every night. The term home is a strechy term.
Thank you Anja!
Yes indeed, i do it also every time!
And i completely agree, it’s indeed a stretchy term. For me this comes from the fact that in twelve years I have lived in many different countries and this has led me a lot to question my origins and where I come from, still a work in progress, part of my artistic research, too.
I liked very much the video and your thoughts and feelings written on this. They describe how I feel about past homes and I realised that we share a lot despite living in different homes. Thank you for sharing this !
Anna this is beautiful. I lived in Sicily for 3 years, and when I left, 10 years went by, and then a few years ago I went again. I took similar videos driving toward the town we lived in. I remember the music playing, my camera filming, all this sensory overload of emotions trying to process what 10 years of absence means in a place you love. I remember thinking I was silly to be filming scenes from the highway but somehow I just wanted to hold onto them in a way that I would not lose them. I have lived in many countries and have many memories like this full of nostalgia. Now I am at my parents house, here I still have many of the things from my childhood and some of my favorite objects like my music box collection. Stuck in bed with COVID I keep staring at the bookshelf across from my bed with all my old books of Latin American poetry that were my favorite things to read as a child. There is such comfort in them, and I’m excited that they will be there to share with my daughter when she is ready (she is already loving the music boxes at 15 months old). There is difference between returning to a home that was yours for a while (which comes with a sadness I think of things you perhaps know you cannot get back), and a home that represents the intimacy of your childhood that you have known at every stage of your life and that somehow grows with you. All to say, your video brought up all these thoughts. It was beautifully done.
Dear Jennie, thank you so much for your reflections, so beautiful. I am happy that these kinds of thoughts were able to arise through my little video. I too, whenever I go back to my parents’ house in southern Italy I find everything still quite unchanged, as if my things from when I was a child or teenager are waiting for me. And that is very heartening, especially if you travel a lot or change countries often. On the other hand, however, it is inevitable to have a strong sense of nostalgia, because everything seems unchanged, but we know very well that in reality it is not.