“I imagined memories with you within a past that never existed. I remember you not as you were, but as I wished you had been.”
A Past Imagined is shaped by my relationship with my father. Reflecting the absences, uncertainties, and in-between feelings within this relationship, the work becomes both a confrontation and the construction of an imagined past.
The video presents a little girl and a figure representing her father. Yet these images do not refer to reality; they symbolize a past that never existed. Across six scenes, the girl imagines doing the activities she loved with her father: swinging in a park, learning to draw water from a well, playing rock paper scissors, reading together, and drawing.
The only real presence in these images is the girl’s solitude. The father appears as a figure suspended between presence and absence, while his voice is never heard. The sound in the video belongs only to the girl, emphasizing that what is being watched is not memory, but imagination.
The work was produced through an entirely analog and manual process. Approximately 3,000 photographs were printed one by one using the cyanotype technique, then physically intervened with through hand-applied distressing, erasure, fading, and painterly gestures. After a six-month studio process, the prints were scanned individually and brought together sequentially to create the final video.
All visual effects in the work were produced by hand during the printing process; no digital effects were used. The uniqueness of the work lies in this intensive, labor-based process, where a fictional memory is constructed through the material traces of touch, absence, and repetition.