This work takes the form of a 3-channel video installation featuring projections on 3 adjacent walls that are triggered by sensors as visitors approach areas in the space. The left wall shows projections of contemporary landscape; the centre wall presents the narrated stories; the right wall shows historical photos and footage. The narrator, representing me, recollects various personal stories about her family, particularly her late father — a Hungarian Jew who lived through the Holocaust and moved to Canada to start a family — and her brother, who is seeking assistance from the U.S. government to lay a claim for land in Hungary taken by the Germans during the war.

The narrative is formed by gaps and silences. Her father has been dead for 15 years. There is no legal title for the land seized in Hungary during WWII; only a fading photograph exists. The immediate family, reluctant to even discuss the past, keeps all the father’s photographs hidden. In all of this silence is a nexus of refusal and desire, historical trauma and a wish to reclaim the past but not relive it through remembering. These silences construct the conceptual apparatus of the work, since so little of this personal history is actually documented.

In the installation, the 3 channels will interact. As the narrator recites each vignette, the images on the left show present-day views of land, presumably the location under discussion. Images on the right show what seems to be documentary footage from the era. Further, as the stories become more difficult to recollect, the images break down subtly. The attempt to reconstruct the whole story through both time (right) and space (left) only foregrounds what is lost in the present.