Santa Rita, Lost & Found
Santa Rita, Lost and Found is my attempt to build an archive of manufactured afterimages to attempt to recall, remember, and preserve pre-migration memories that I have lost. It is composed of a collection of digitally altered screenshots of Google Street View images of my home region in the Philippines. Through this imagery, I create an imagined village called “Santa Rita” – a village that fills the gaps of my memories and reflects my migratory grief.
Started during the COVID-19 pandemic, this project manifests my longing to revisit my hometown, a place I haven’t visited since moving to Canada. The virus affected my mind and memory, prompting me to find ways to preserve what I could remember. Virtual maps provided me with the opportunity to revisit those places. I collected images that I would alter to look like afterimages – a reflection of the compromised quality of my memory at that time.
For several years, these images sat in my hard drive. Thinking of the best way to present them to the public, I realized that posting them on an online platform such as Instagram would convey the ephemeral nature of the images, while the social media aspect of it gives it a sense of immediacy despite its artificiality.
This is an ongoing project, and images will be posted periodically at @in_santa_rita.