I moved from country to country in my childhood. I always found myself lost in different cultures and people that I was surrounded by, but it made me stronger; because I still remember who I was and where I belong.
However, the experiences of moving to a new country gave me a fear of being forgotten. Right after my fourteenth birthday, I had to leave behind my memories, friends, home and even the Acacia trees to come to Indonesia; I was scared to be forgotten by all the people and things that shared my memory. That feeling of being forgotten was soon eased when my friend gave me a book called Daiwa-Hen, written by Korean Japanese writer, Kazuki Kaneshiro. In the book, the man was in grief because her girlfriend was dead in a car accident. His friend, worried about his sadness, says, “You think she is dead but she’s not. As long as you remember her, she is still alive in your mind.”
I was struck by that line and still am because it eases my fear of being forgotten. But now, even that fear becomes a part of my childhood memory and I start to rephrase that line. Then it says, “She’s dead, when she’s forgotten in your memory.” In this project, I am projecting myself in memory, memory of everything: me in someone else’s memory and me in my memory. I might be dying or decaying in memory, if I am being forgotten. I might be freshly alive.
However, the experiences of moving to a new country gave me a fear of being forgotten. Right after my fourteenth birthday, I had to leave behind my memories, friends, home and even the Acacia trees to come to Indonesia; I was scared to be forgotten by all the people and things that shared my memory. That feeling of being forgotten was soon eased when my friend gave me a book called Daiwa-Hen, written by Korean Japanese writer, Kazuki Kaneshiro. In the book, the man was in grief because her girlfriend was dead in a car accident. His friend, worried about his sadness, says, “You think she is dead but she’s not. As long as you remember her, she is still alive in your mind.”
I was struck by that line and still am because it eases my fear of being forgotten. But now, even that fear becomes a part of my childhood memory and I start to rephrase that line. Then it says, “She’s dead, when she’s forgotten in your memory.” In this project, I am projecting myself in memory, memory of everything: me in someone else’s memory and me in my memory. I might be dying or decaying in memory, if I am being forgotten. I might be freshly alive.
