Family traffic
With my recent exhibition (Kingdom Loops 2002-2020) in London at Project DIVFUSE, I was fortunately able to travel over for it, and to spend time visiting family there as well. This experience has shown me that the work in this show largely overlaps with the Self-surveillance project, despite the fact that this work was not itself SS work.
The origin of the work in this show mainly pre-dates the SS concept, and as such they don't connect with the family-oriented work I have focused on during the past 10+ years. Despite this, there are elements of the work itself that do connect with SS: this has to do with my time living in London, at the end of which was spent making repeated visits to the German embassy there in the process of applying for a passport. If there is an "origin story" for the SS work this would be it, as gaining the passport set me on a path to thinking about my identity and family in particular ways.
Another (smaller, but still important) factor for my route to SS is about the specific setting of these videos in Kingdom Loops: although overlooking Hammersmith Broadway with my camera, this was not the only camera there at the time, as there were many surveillance cameras arrayed throughout that space (visible and not visible from our vantage point). This pervasive surveillance had a large impact on the work and thinking I did at the time, and future working methods.
The other important part about this exhibition (and my trip to London) is the fact that this work brought together a number of people in my family; it was not a reunion in the conventional sense, but I had the chance to share the exhibition space with many of them individually, which is a very rare thing for me.