Lineage


My first visions of Puglia were built by language before they were created with light. The brushstrokes of my grandparents words, simple Italian words we would hopefully know, built the South of Italy for me. Sometimes images of their lives growing up in Puglia would take shape in my mind just from my Nonna’s laughter, from the cadence of her speech changing as she’d turn her body away to relive something particularly difficult, or from her tremoring hand as it reached out to grasp mine.

The Puglia that materialised in front of my eyes when I visited Italy was different. It’s buildings came into focus so sharp it was almost unsettling. The melanzane pasta we had grown up eating but never finding in restaurants was suddenly being served to us daily. The salty ocean water took over my senses: it embedded itself into my nostrils, lay on the back of my throat, and cooled my fingertips down so I couldn’t click the shutter on my camera, forcing complete presence.

These two versions of Puglia seemed at odds with one another. The clarity of witnessing this world for myself after decades of verbal stories felt somehow wrong, as though I’d consciously misremembered a story but continued to share the false tale. While I was grateful to have visited the place that built my family’s lineage, and nurtured, tested, and loved them, I also found myself yearning for the fuzzy version of Puglia that had been left behind. It was in the blurred edges of the churches and the unfocused, misty crops that I learnt about my grandparents: about their love and their trauma and their fierce, fierce resolve to shelter and protect their family. But it was in the physical Puglia that I was able to place these experiences, to see how real they were, and only begin to comprehend the severing they must have felt when they left. And so I printed one of the few images I took in Puglia, and began bridging these two worlds together.

Cyanotype on watercolour paper, using a negative printed on 70gsm tracing paper. Created on Wurundjeri-willam Country.