OSVALDA

These images emerge from the tension between memory and reality. Returning to my birthplace, Athens, after thirteen years, I sought to reconnect with my estranged family. When they last saw me, I was nine years old, and in the years between we had not spoken. I was quickly confronted with the reality that life had continued without me. Although surrounded by family, I felt like an outsider. My cousin now had children who had never heard of me, and my 90 year old grandfather lived quietly, eating, sleeping, and listening to the radio in solitude. The only real moments I shared with him were when I followed him around with my camera. These works are shaped by nostalgia of returning to a place that is both deeply familiar and strangely distant, imagining the life I might have lived had I never left, and what it means to feel like a stranger to one’s own blood.

Silver gelatin print on fiber paper