“Around my home”, is a mental journey and a physical bond: A series of juxtaposed images and streams of words throughout. Taken on and around the premises of my family’s residence home where I have always lived and come to be, this sojourn is documented through a series of photos that if looked at separately might seem to be individual images that have little relationship, yet when placed together create a personal narrative of my own altered feelings during the isolation period required during the pandemic of Covid-19, we are enduring. The journey is a manifestation of the phase of my own feelings of doubt and the continuous flow of questions in my mind. The journey is a manifestation of how home can be envisioned as a place that lives within you, around you and a place that is created by you. It can be your body and your physical realm.

Confining in a place for a long time has allowed me to explore the notion of my home and its structure as a place that unfolds and changes before my eyes just as my own self changes. A home can be seen as a place of evolution and life... not necessarily a place of warmth and familiarity, but as a place of strangeness and adaptation. Certain spots at home carry meaning and memories since your childhood. They have a specific meaning and change as you explore them. Home is a place you build and shape your relationship with and, not every place in it is comfortable. It took me some time to find that sweet bitter spot at home. My thought process and the way the series rounded together was inspired mainly by day to day spontaneous thoughts and unplanned activities that used to encompass my day. Book quotations I found resonated so well with my current milieu, to objects and to certain locations at home that helped me live with my isolation and adapt to a place I know is my home but still doubted its reality.

As my days pass they are not the same yet they appear to endlessly repeat themselves. I find myself walking towards the little garden on my grandmother’s balcony trying to connect it to my outer world, overlooking the grounds and slides of my childhood. This is where I can breathe properly and see beyond the sky, beyond my physical and mental peripheries. It’s where I can expand and grow. It is also where I can hide behind my shadows. Behind my own doubting self. Questioning what and where I reached out to and whether I was able to achieve a small part of what I dreamt of. I’m bound to think and feel disconnection and separation, although I’m embraced in the place I feel most familiar in. Yet the feelings of the word “separation” remain within me and never leave my body. The feelings manifest in me physically, like a gravitational pull, when I look back over my life and wonder what holds are there on the self? Do connections have to be physically visible? Do all boundaries separate into multitudes of parts so many they can no longer be located in time or even in physical space?