The four of us are from different countries and speak different languages. What we all have in common, however, is a sense of isolation and disconnection from the city. After a few video calls, we witnessed one other's honesty about struggling in an unfamiliar city, and we named this moment of discovery 'Spark'. We gave each other the task of marking a point on a map of the cities we were in or designating each other missions, and we decided to express everything we felt there in our own way. There were a few ground rules: be transparent about your feelings and use your native tongue.
The assignment was combined to create Here, Not Here, using materials collected from the three locations assigned by our members. The photo collage was inspired by the collage technique of David Hockney's Joiners. Joiners was influenced by Cubism, a movement away from the perspective-driven representation, that has been around since the Renaissance, where objects are perceived from multiple perspectives simultaneously. This technique was appropriate for expressing my feelings about this city - fragmented and disjointed.
My family asks me how I'm settling into my new city, and they visit me via Street View in Google Maps. They’ve seen my neighbourhood, hgb, the park nearby, central station, countless times, but there are certain things that are unphotographable. The sound of a bird chirping, a tiny clover that can only be found by scouring the wet grass, the sound of the wind rustling the leaves, the warmth of my breath as I climb up a small hill... My thoughts and feelings are floating, unnoticed, in the void between the fragmented pieces. These voids are filled by the viewer's imagination. This leads us to wonder what fills the spaces between the fragments of the city we live in.
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