Neither Here Nor There But Just As Important is originally a multimedia work consisting of photographs, videos, and text woven into a photo set and a silent five-channel video installation. It was created in 2020 as an expansion of Here, Here, a short film that I made in 2019, centered on a town in slow decay as a result of large-scale mining operations. Both works are loose visual studies on the various ways and degrees the human body relates with the physical environment in a colonized land. In a country like ours, land is synonymous to life, thus the long-standing dispute over it.
What triggered the creation of this multimedia work was the departure of two of my closest friends from and to the mountains to take part in the struggle for societal liberation, and the subsequent introspection on my inability to make the same choices. I was supposed to show the work in an international public exhibition in 2020, but decided to back out at the last minute. I felt that it was too personal, and chose to store away the files in an old hard drive.
I chanced upon the files again in late 2023. So much has changed in the past years that I could barely recognize myself in the work. The current iteration is a single-channel mixed media work consisting of the same photographs, videos, and text that it originally had, but now feels closer to fiction than fact - a development that I am proud of. No grudges, no regrets, I now happily consider this work as an ode to our collective capacity for growth, and for making and accepting difficult decisions.