(Re)Imagining Paul's Homelands
(Re) Imagining Paul's Homelands MFA Thesis Show, Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art, Washington University-St. Louis
While we can never pretend to fully understand someone's background, we can position ourselves to encounter their world, if only in fragments. This work is an attempt to understand one individual through an aggregation of personal narrative, material elements and soundbites, or artifacts, of his world. I present a partial biography of my friend, Paul Pajo, whom I met in Afghanistan in 2003. Informed by Paul's recounted memories of five distinct places he has called home (Afghanistan, Burma/Myanmar, The Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore), I physically re-member Paul's world. Contained within tea bags, these traces of home are displayed within a context of social ritual. By encountering Paul's narrative while immersed in the sights, sounds and smells of each homeland, we might begin to consider how locales shapes lived experiences and the individual.
This work asks, how might encountering another individual's place, through displaced sensory elements, further or impede hospitality? Can fragmented, re-presented elements of place disrupt our own imaginings of home, enough to make room to consider, enter in to another's reality?