Elsewhere

The quest to understand where we come from, where we go, and at times, to question where we are, is the thread that links together the pieces of the trilogy “Elsewhere”. The word itself implies anywhere but here, an unknown or perhaps unknowable place. A place we are not.

For a few years I had been documenting my mother Alice. She was living in a retirement residence, her eyesight failing, along with her short-term memory. She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. In 2016, she was moved to the Bruyere Centre’s long-term care floor. Visits with her were predictable, focused on assisting her with eating, and often answering the same questions over and over again. Her world seemed small and looped, except when she was having a delusion. Then we might find ourselves on a train, wondering if it was time to get off yet. Or she might read aloud a book or letter she squinted to read in the air above her. More frightening delusions involved falling, being locked into a space, or abandoned while waiting for her husband Jim to come find her.

I have tried to capture some of this in the opening piece of this trilogy, which I quite simply named “Alice”. Replacing her fearful delusions with the hope of something more comforting, I imagined that in the moments she was not quite with me in the present world, she had drifted back to a happier time.

Building upon the question “Where are they?”, the second part of the film, “Jim”, was a response to the enduring grief I felt over the death of my father in 2001. Searching in my personal archives, I found a tape I had recorded of him reading the book of the generations of Jesus Christ. This was in fact part of an old art school project, in which I paired the reading with very close-up images of a woman’s body. At the time - and still - I marveled at the near exclusion of women in the reciting of Christ’s genealogy. Men begat more men over 14 generations, with only the occasional reference to the names of the women who must have done the actual begetting. It incensed me. Of course there was another reason this passage, and the recording of my dad reading it, found its way into this film. My own genealogy and lineage was complicated by adoption, and for the first 25 years of my life, I didn’t know where I came from.

Which brings us to the concluding chapter in the Elsewhere trilogy - “Nancy” - named after my biological mother.

Filming of “Nancy” began in the spring of 2023 in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. This was the city where my mother was living when she became pregnant with me. I had only been there once before, when my friend and fellow art student Colin Mackenzie convinced me to join him during his cross-Canada hitch-hiking trip in 1988.

I had been using what little information I had been given about my private adoption to search for my mother. I knew her last name, that she was from Thunder Bay, and that she was 16 or 17 years old when I was born. In those pre-internet days, I had been using city directories and birth and death notices stored on microfiche at the National Archives of Canada, to research and create family trees for all families with the same last name living in either Fort William or Port Arthur, Ontario. In the year I was born, these two small cities had yet to be amalgamated into one. The Adoption Disclosure Registry had only recently been initiated by the province, and I knew the quicker way to find my mother was to go to Thunder Bay and make contact with some of the families I had been tracking. I was successful. I made contact with some of Nancy’s relatives, but wasn’t put in touch with her until I had returned to Ottawa. She and her four children were living in Toronto, and it was another week before I learned her name, and another month or more before I met her.

In July 2018 the Canadian Senate published a report entitled "The Shame is Ours: Forced Adoptions of the Babies of Unmarried Mothers in Post-war Canada." It calls for a national apology to those impacted by forced adoption practices in the years following World War II. That apology is still pending.

https://sencanada.ca/en/info-page/parl-42-1/soci-adoption-mandate/