Re/Turn is 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 necessity to explore the memories of my origin and rises therefore questions about 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 that, for this project, the notion of imaginary homeland could be 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 the heritage that 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, and the meaning of 'home' ambivalent. 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/Turn an interest in the notion of the passage of time, as expressed in the movement of the body and in its surroundings. The paradox of simultaneously getting closer to and further away becomes a meditation on the division in Re/Turn.
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