The most important things an archive can do is to ask or allow us to interrogate [those] moments of transition. ¹

8 Warrenside documents the transition of the current family archives - collections of 35mm slides and my Caribbean grandparents’ home before it is put on the market for sale – from ones centred in specific physical conditions to a moving image archive sitting outside a fixed physical plane.

Central to my project is the photographs’ positioning as objects within a physical space in a state of suspension, where distortion is used to oppose the binary ‘otherness’ and ‘elsewheres’ defining the Caribbean diaspora by intertwining and mutually interacting the past and present in this physical context.

The creation of a film as my chosen medium is pivotal to the communication of temporality through the passage of time encapsulated within film as a finite medium. Underpinning the concepts outlined is a minimal soundscape centered on three key realities; the progression through limited photographic material, the finite access to the archival space, and the overwhelming presence of absence.

My project challenges binary understandings of diaspora as fixed in singular times and places and is an articulation of the role of physicality within intergenerational experiences of diasporic existence, explored through a negotiation between presence and absence.