On Exile

As an artist and filmmaker, I have always been interested in ideas of identity, otherness, and exile, having the concept of migration permeated my practice since the beginning - departing from a reflection on my own immigrant condition. Thus, choosing to examine refugeeism more closely seemed to be a natural prolongation of my research. Through interviews with individuals and families, I aimed at investigating notions of home and belonging, the challenges of displacement, the adjustment to a new language, and assimilation to another culture. Conceptually, it made sense to film the refugees in their new houses, sheltered from violence, war and death, inhabiting different rooms and environments. The act of looking at their lives from inside seemed to be a more ethical and humble approach, in what I decided to call ‘ethnography of daily life’.

The camera work shows the subjects’ difficulty and anxiety, but also their creativity and agency as storytellers as they gesture, think, and show images on their phones. I also wanted to apply more literally the notion of displacement to the aesthetics of the film, by using the camera in active, anxious, displaced, and fragmented ways, alluding perhaps to nomadic and migratory processes (both physical and psychological). In general, my cinematography tends to incorporate dislocation as a visual element, by fragmenting the body in various landscapes: the other is both staged and found. Such filming approach derives from my interest in the idea that self and identity are not fixed, but multiple, locational and situational, subject to ongoing transformations and metamorphoses.

Although I found myself not particularly interested in identifying visually the specific place or city where these interviews were being conducted, I needed a counterpoint to the conversations and the bodies unfolding in front of the camera. Lake Erie, as one of the Great Lakes, and an essential part of Cleveland's history and identity, emerged as that counterpoint. In fact, the lake becomes a subject in itself in this essay film. As if it was the perfect interlocutor with each one of the participants, giving them, and the viewers, an opportunity for expansion and freedom when compared to the confinement of the interiors, and the enclosed ‘space’ of trauma and pain. Interspersing interviews with landscape, navigating bodies and spaces, and allowing silence to exist, I embraced documentary as form, resisting the more traditional and journalistic approach.

Lastly, the insertion into the video of the 1957 book, written by the German-Lithuanian philosopher Kazys Claude Cirtautas (an exile himself) on Postwar Europe’s displaced persons, aims at establishing a dialogue between a now and a then, a present and a past, underlining an historical and simultaneously non-temporal perspective about the psychological and sociological conditions of the refugee. Although published more than half century ago, and almost entirely forgotten, this study could well be applied to the current migration crisis. It also brings to the forefront the question of the archive, and of the book as an object/depository of knowledge.