This performance was produced and documented during trinity square video’s ‘the imaginary and the synchronous’ workshop. The camera operator was Jasmeet Sidhu. The instructor was Irene Loughlin.

I worked with the idea of disattachment (a word I chose that is dissimilar to detachment) for this performance.
I meditated with that word together with this photo album. This is because I feel a distance between myself and the experiences of my family. The photos in this album are from when my grandparents and their children emigrated to north America. They made a better life for themselves here coming from a developing country, despite the adversity of being brown in the areas they lived in which were predominantly white and, in my dad’s case, not speaking a word of english.
This album is an archive, carefully curated pictures of their experience created by my grandparents. I wanted to produce a different arrangement of these documented experiences, an archive for my own understanding of their experience, literally and figuratively disattaching these photos from the already standing archive of memories.
I hang them up above and around me in the free air, my own organization of an auratic experience of these documented experiences of my family: a strange but comforting, beautiful, and somehow familiar occurrence I’ve created for myself.
They stay hanging in this performance and this installation; I still haven’t figured out what exactly these documents mean to me. I’m still working that out.