20/11/2020
The concept of ‘HERE’ for me was quite easy to grasp. My identity as a location wasn’t that hard to pinpoint as a lot of myself can be found here at home. Because of the pandemic making me take the class from home, it felt almost fitting.
The 15-second film I made are footages of different places in my house.
This process had made me really consider what truly defined ‘HERE’ for me. I knew it was my house, but what part of it specifically, and why?
Maybe it wasn’t the structure of the house so to speak, but the sight I see every day and the things I do around the house. Especially now when I’m taking classes while the rest of my family are out to work or school, I mostly spend the day alone in the house wandering around. I took a day off to see how I’d spend my time in the house and recorded snippets of my day, compiling it into this film.
In class, we were asked to draw a map of a place we knew well. Though I could draw a map of my house, an interesting place I thought of was my journey in London last year, where it was my first time living alone. As I didn’t know my way around very well, there were only a handful of places that I could visit without a map. Those being my accommodation, the university, the grocery stores, and the airport when I fly home for the holidays.
I ran out of time so I couldn’t make it as detail as I had wanted, though my quick sketch revealed my subconscious understanding of the place in terms of distance, what with how far the airport is or how long the Tube journeys are. It made me weirdly nostalgic of my time in London.
Though I initially felt that certainly, HERE for me was my home in Thailand and the different things I do, there was comfort in the routine I had when I was in London. HERE for me was anywhere that I learned more about myself and could navigate like a local. HERE for me could very well be the same Tube line and bus route I took to school or the five-minute walk to Lidl’s.