A collection of stories about objects that migrants carried across. A comb, a letter, a wooden toy, a building, knowledge of a game, music, taste, trauma... altogether forming a scattered portrait of contemporary migration.
Book, metal tin case, visual index
complete PDF
(excerpt - the last chapter)
For me, there was always only one way to attempt this paper. I had begun to notice patterns in my travels. I caught myself in the midst of a complex network of interlacing stories, all of them unsorted but linked to one another. Only by writing it down did I begin to understand its composition, and only by having lived through them did I understand the necessity of the subject. In that sense, it was by telling a story, recalling people, and describing the whole thing that I could let the viewer naturally come to the same conclusion I did.
The stories I heard were completing one another, creating a vague timeline. As an immigrant, I tread a path that was drawn by others before me. In a short time, I’ve met compassionate and gentle people who freely opened their hearts. Once I felt ready, I started writing. I considered objects as bearers of stories and imagined an intricate network of displacements in the world. The relationship we have with our things could be analyzed in different scales—inwards: why we need it, how we use it to tell stories, to make sense of the world; and outwards: what becomes of them once we brought them over, their own agency in the new environment.
Since the moments I have are limited and have ended, I recalled each story and conversation, played it in my head a dozen times, like a camera placed from different angles, each time changing the speaker’s point of view, from afar, from up close.
In my film practice I’ve worked closely with people, building trust over time. A documentary lets the subjects speak for themselves, they exist as we see them. But in written form the implications would change as I’d be sharing the words sometimes spoken in a passing moment, immortalizing it. So people became characters, and I became “I”. Auto fiction was my attempt to respect the lives of people I’ve met, and through this abstraction, speak about a people, instead of one individual.
“I” is devoid of a history or an internal monologue, and reacts to the world around them. Through “I”, this book would like to convey the understanding that things will appear if you choose to look—if you look at every brief encounter with keen eyes. Because history flows through “I” like it does to everyone else.
Whilst writing, I discovered Tim O’Brien’s “The things they carried”. It was excellent—a memoir/fiction about a man’s time as a soldier in the Vietnam War. One passage of the book is wholly cited on page 53 detailing a list of what the soldiers had on them throughout their service, what kinds of objects and how heavy they were, measured in pounds. Bullets—8 pounds, firearm—10, a photograph of a lost lover, or a fallen comrade’s finger. They were walking towards nowhere. Sometimes killing, sometimes sparing. They were soldiers, so they did as told. And as the mind tore itself apart in war, those were the things they took for the march towards uncertain death, or rather, what they needed to keep on walking.
I made the connection between the American soldiers and the immigrants who left home to start anew, sometimes against their will, and took the title of the book but bringing it to the present. British anthropologist Mary Douglas once said that our things act as markers for our lives, marking events, communicate and build a network of meaning between people as a society. Examining the history of certain objects I encountered was a way to understand my place in its ancestry—a reversal of roles, as opposed to me owning the object.
“Things” as they were mentioned take all forms: physical—games, books, letters, seeds, a building, or something else intangible—music, taste, and trauma.
[...]
The index of the book visible on the cover is one single phrase. It means, quite simply, that only by having lived through the entire thing could you look back and see the whole sentence. Each story constitutes only a part of the whole. This idea came from Italo Calvino’s If on winter’s night a traveller.
This was my method of assembly. No matter how short-lived, each encounter was thoroughly examined, then placed in my structure of disarray, forming a scattered contemporary story of migration.
with custom-built shelf
physical copy available upon request
final edition of 30; numbered, screen-printed and hand-bound
60 EUR