​SITAARA STODEL Photographer

Home is Where the House is

 

Home is Where the House is consists of a series of photographic collages and videos based around my personal experiences of growing up continuously moving house. During the time of being raised by my single mother and living with my two older sisters, we were evicted many times. From the time we left my father when I was two, until the end of my high school education, I moved over twenty times. When I moved out of my mother’s home, I continued this ‘tradition’ of migrancy, mainly out of habit.

 

I started this project by collaging other people’s family snapshots, which I found at a second hand store. With hindsight, I began to realize that I had subconsciously been drawn to making work about home, fragmented memories, domesticity and interior family spaces. From here, I decided to investigate my memories by curating and arranging other peoples’ experiences and presenting them as my own. I have used traditional collaging techniques as well as sewing and weaving into found photographs. The processes of cutting and piercing are aggressive ones. The act of painstakingly sewing photographs together speaks of a desire and longing to create a home that does not exist. At some point, I came across my parents’ wedding photographs, which hadn’t been seen since they were developed thirty years ago. I began working into these images and treating them as found objects as well.

 

After photographing a set made from paper from the inside of a home, with myself inserted as the subject, I experimented with making videos. I filmed my hands collaging images of myself moving from one house to the next, held together by the provisional mediums of string and adhesive putty. In these videos, I am revisiting my experience of the constant need to ‘make a home’ with each move. These works speak to a longing for and simultaneous rejection of notions of home.