Up the Blue Stream (2018-2019)
Drawing from Annette Kuhn’s concept of ‘memory work’, this series looks at how family deals with the loss of the father and how grief transforms people and memories. My father lost his father when he was a young boy; his father had been born out-of-wedlock during the WWII, which raised suspicions that he might have been the son of a German or a Russian soldier. After his early passing away, the family kept silent about him and his uncertain ancestry. When I was born, it was almost like he never existed. By visiting the family photographs taken during this life and initiating conversations with my family, I am looking not to uncover the unspoken truths of domestic life, but to reflect on inherited trauma, memory rituals, and the construction of masculinity during the communist era in Romania.
