The Door That Opens is a short animation that expands upon a series of darkroom and alternative process photographic prints called “paroxysms.” The images created for both works depict varied textures of the Italian volcanic island of Stromboli, where my great-grandparents lived and farmed before coming to Brooklyn in the early 1900s. Stromboli has always held a near-mythological allure for me, not only as the floating home of the Greek god Aeolus – the keeper of the winds, but also in its family context – as both a fertile and unstable ground for farming and living - a constant torsion of beauty and precarity. Having never physically been to Stromboli, I am left with a long series of abstractions to make sense of it – narratives passed down from family members, small geological artifacts, a 1950 film by Roberto Rossellini starring Ingrid Bergman, and other images/sounds/videos available in the public domain. For years, a small jar of black volcanic sand and a few stones that my grandmother brought back when she visited served as the only physical connectors to Stromboli beyond the body. They sat on the ledge above her sink under a stained glass image of the Brooklyn bridge – next to a wooden cross, small troll doll, bowl of pine cones, and several miniature Stromboli homes. Newly imbued with or, alternately perhaps, devoid of emotional significance, these moving images - generated from scans of stone and sand, webcam footage of eruptions, google maps screenshots, etc. are a momentary convening in which an effort to get closer to an experience, memory, dream, landscape, or texture, results in abstraction or material flattening – a loss of color and depth, a construct of noise and digital approximation. Bringing those textures into physical space via analog printing before pushing them back toward the digital fabricates a staged and stilted recollection of a landscape that is at once viscerally and familially relevant, but appears to wash away just beneath the images that make up its surface. How, in an ongoing image system of digital distance-making and visual eruptions, might we restore some of the emotionality of natural textures and processes of a place?