My house is not meant to be seen. It holds so much weight to it that even taking a photo of its interior is an invasion of privacy. To let people stare and wander in the rooms that compose it fills me with a level of dread that I am not ready to let go. I wonder then if it is a cop out, then, to fail to represent it in image.
In my 2022 film Casita, wisps of colors and hints of furniture (especially a bed) are what give the illusion away. This space is one that is inhabited. It’s one where I am meant to be surrounded by what I enjoy and love. It is something that I’ve curated through years of my life (more specifically 15 or so years of them). My film fails to let the viewer see it in its entirety. Would you know that it is a bedroom, or mine, if it wasn’t stated in the statement? If the title was not 'house' in Spanish and you didn’t know that I spoke it? That this was the home I still live in with my parents and siblings now and for the years to come?
Representing a location and its entanglements with both life and trauma and memories is something that’s continuously held my obsession. By vocalizing memories into a framework and turning it into a process was one way I grappled with my frustration that linearity brought me. And yet this is the same process that has led me to the frustration I have today.
Did my fears towards my own house (physical and immaterial) force me to disassociate it and disassemble it so much that it becomes near impossible to read?
Where Do I Live? Where Is My Space? is an installation piece where I extracted and stole objects from my room and my house to create a mini-identity piece within my school’s Graduation Exhibition Show. It took residence in a corner in a dark room, with a projection of a MPU (Memory Processing Unit) live-generated video spilling over the objects. This video was composed of digicam footage of my own room and of me thumbing through old photo albums buried deep within my house. Eventually, this live-video was recorded (effectively forcing it into a linear video format) and turned into the microfilm Casita.
It’s a cruel joke that I do not feel satisfied by any of these installments. Something about my house is haunting me, and I have yet found a way to exorcize it.
If taking pieces of it out to create an installation wasn’t enough,
and if taking digicam footage of it and letting it live in a forever unchanging state wasn’t enough,
and if recording it and turning it into a static microfilm wasn’t enough,
then what will it take for me to finally feel free of this burden of representing my home?
A home is where identities are left to fester and die. All the leftover cocoons that were left on the floorboards have taken up residence and you begin to see ghosts. You know this house inside out, enough that walking through it in the dark isn’t disorienting. The staircase has the familiar creaks and bumps that you can recognize just by pressing your foot against them. It’s love you have towards this childhood home and the landscape that sprawls beyond it. And I’ve never moved once from its embrace, at least not since I was developmentally capable of remembering it anyways.
The elephants in the room never quite form themselves. It feels like an invasion of privacy to be publicly showcasing the interior of my home like this, even though there isn’t anything inside of it that’d make me feel embarrassed to showcase. I could chalk it up to the feeling of anonymity, but it doesn’t address the biggest thorn of shame that I have: the shame that comes up when I think of bringing anyone into this building.
Because out of the many things this house represents, the most fitting one is failure. My failure to take the road out of it, to leave and live my fullest life and to possibly be at peace with myself. There is a deceptive calming lull that a childhood home brings, and that is the security that it claims to bring with the cost of it defining your life, as much as you try to not let it.
The house I live in becomes an anchor point that I cannot escape, unless I finally escape it.
Personal identity within a childhood home becomes the home itself. It is shaped by the tenants inside and the events that surround it. Your memories embed themselves into the walls and the furnishings and like a very bad stain, just don’t leave.
My family, my transness, my queerness, my dreams and desires all revolve around this singular building.
The outside is what I brought back into this home, and it fragments the identities inside.
If it’s impossible for me to get over my fears, then I must contain it.