dima

  • Re/Turn

    The past is a country from which we all emigrated, and its loss is part of our humanity“ (S. Rushdie) Re/Turnis a multimedia project for which I recorded moments of returning to the place where I was born. After more than a decade living abroad, this work was born out of a neccessity to explore the memories of my origin and rises therefor questions towards a new hybrid identity. As the Indian-English novelist Salman Rushdie has written, it is impossible for emigrants to recover the homelands they have left behind. The best they can do is „to create fictions, not actual cities and villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands.“ It seemed to me in this project that the notion of imaginary homelandis very helpful for thinking about my childhood and early youth in Romania. The strong maternal and paternal images i create in this work are a continuation of my heritage which i take with me in my Western domicile where i also return to. The destination of the metaphor of the journey as returns is unclear, as well as the ambivalence of what home means. The partial nature of these memories which i collect and add to a posteriori, their fragmentation and discontinuity are evocations of a highly personal and symbolical narrative of memory and home. There is in Re/Turnan interest in the notion of the passage of time as expressed in the movement of the body, and its surroundings. The paradox of simultaneously getting closer to and further away meditates on the division in Re/Turn.