Country Roads, Take Me Home (2023)
projection, lights, sound, mirrors
Country Roads, Take Me Home, is an immersive artwork composed of projection, lights, sound, and objects. It is my attempt to capture and manufacture after-images of my childhood and pre-migration memories growing up in the Philippines using appropriated map imagery and light forms based on the types of leaves that I used to see as a child.
The video is an altered screen recording of myself going through Google street view of the area where I grew up. It goes through a stretch of road of a barangay or small village in a rural area, going through rice fields, woods, and residential areas. I pretend to experience a homecoming, returning to my home I haven’t been to in the past fifteen years.
I use mirrors shaped like mango, guava, santol, jute, and bamboo leaves – the common plants that I used to see every day. It’s the leaves we use to sweep at the school yard in elementary school. I reflect these shapes and overlay them around the video projection and around the space to create a canopy of fallen leaves.
A soft beacon-like sound plays with each step forward, a prompt for the search of memory and connection that I have lost. This sound is an altered recording of the subtle click of my trackpad – the sound of my footsteps in this virtual journey.
In this work, I question the authenticity of my memories and, in a way, my identity. I struggle to hold on to things that I can no longer reach.
