Exactly one year ago I set out on what was a highly anticipated journey: a family reunion 2 years in the making - organised by my dear aunt in Germany.
Twenty five members of my African/Czech-German family came together from all corners of the globe to seek out our roots in the Czech Republic where our common great great grandfather was from. It was indeed the journey of a lifetime. But it was also the start of a new cycle, a turn onto a new path, with the intention of redirecting the purpose of my life, or just how I live it.
Naturally I planned on documenting this reunion and creating some sort of project out of it. But I also wanted to catalyze my photographic aspirations in the direction of fine arts and away from anything commercial. So I also took my portfolio with me, with the intention hitting the galleries in the hopes of finding at least one curator who might be interested in showing my work.
I also applied to Oxford Trinity in London to train in TESOL (Teaching English As a Foreign Language)so that I could increase my ability to travel more and further, where I could explore new cultures and create new work. Also if I could spend more time abroad, I thought, I could delve into my past with relatives and old friends across the oceans, who all could perhaps help 're-member' an old self I was convinced had been squelched by my New York City life.
On the surface the following may seem a strange statement to make(since truly, I've never really lived a conventional life - always 'seeming' to follow every creative impulse), but I was seeking (via travel I guess) to purify my creative exchange with life, to learn to live more authentically, to experience my life rather than simply to survive it; to appreciate it and quietly direct it rather than to grade it according to external factors of failure and success.
A year later, I'm still on that trip, and still living out of a suitcase. Not everything went according to plan, as is life, right? And my travels have not been nearly as exotic as I dreamed...yet; but every minute of the last metamorphic 365 days have been filled with extraordinarily palpable, authentic experiences that continue to transform me daily with gratitude, wonderment, and love. It was indeed a rather auspicious, or you could say fortuitous occasion that I would begin such a journey on a family reunion.
As some of you may recall - I promised to blog about all this, but never quite got around to it. But dammit, I can't let all my little videos and snapshots stay in the proverbial dust cabinet now can I?! So at long last I begin to 'show' this story, though again, I won't promise consistency as current life events or 'whims' will continue to compete for blog space. So, after much adieu:
