Urbanautica

Awali
by Sue Vaughton

portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023', 2023
Category: Memories and Traditions

Awali is an oil township in Bahrain. The rows of single-story homes were built with an American suburban design in mind. Awali provided many facilities, including a hospital, church, primary school, library, swimming pool, cinema, social club, tennis courts, cricket ground, and golf course. My grandfather took his young family there and sought opportunity in the post-war era. It was where my parents met and where I was born.

Tragically, after a brief illness, my father died, which significantly changed the course of my and my mother's lives. It wasn't until my late teens that I felt the full impact of grief, though it happened when I was only tenyears old.

A question like Where are you from? never comes naturally to me. My parents moved when I was two, and they lived and worked in seven other countries, leading to a unique experience of not belonging to any specific place.

For the first time since I left Awali, I returned to Bahrain in 2023 to investigate my family's history in Bahrain. Through this journey of rediscovery, I gained unprecedented insights into my beginnings and identity, leading to a deeper understanding of myself than I'd ever imagined possible.

Review by URBANAUTICA

The present is a continuous reconciliation with the past. The choices we ponder reflect the collection of images deposited as sediments in us. This burden, we call memory, is nothing other than our identity, shaped by experience and therefore in flux. Some of these experiences weigh more than others, however. They are often like rocks that define our inner coast. Others are far away and may appear like remote islands in our archipelago. Strips of land emerging from the sea of amnesia, that's memory. Sooner or later, they will sink. So, sailing in time to explore their internal geography may be fruitful. Sue Vaughton does so when she lifts her anchor to return to her childhood ground 50 years later. On the island of Bahrain, in the oil town of Awali, where his grandfather moved in 1945, where her parents met, and where she was born and raised for some time. That's until her father passed away too soon. From there, she begins a pilgrimage with her mother across the world, following life circumstances often imposed. The question "where you come from?" becomes an unnecessary inconvenience. Rolling in the course of events along the river of fate, like a broken trunk, like an uprooted plant, sooner or later leads to a return upstream to the source of one's story. From this kind of journey, Sue Vaughton takes away remains, emotional traces, and fragments of situations in the form of images. These are hers, and they manifest intention and profound willpower. We may not understand memory, but we certainly comprehend it—a word, the latter, which means to take in completely, even without fully understanding everything.

Awali by Sue Vaughton

Review by URBANAUTICA

Awali
by Sue Vaughton