HEIMWEG / WAY HOME
by Alicja Khatchikian
portfolio shortlisted call 'URBANAUTICA INSTITUTE AWARDS 2021', 2021
Category: Anthropology and Territories
HEIMWEG / WAY HOME (2019–)
What are family photo archives without someone to tell their stories?
And what if their narratives are discordant and conflictual?
HEIMWEG is an autobiographical project dealing with the themes of memory, belonging, and family after a bitter separation.
Through the fixed focal length of a 35-mm camera and an intimate gaze, this visual work embodies a reflection on the power of photography to evoke remote emotions while combining landscapes and thoughts with family archive material and new images.
All photographs were taken in two small towns on the Italian border with Slovenia. The path of the river Soča/Isonzo, which flows for over 130 km between them, becomes the thread of this story and the metaphor for my parents' unspoken relationship.
Over time and repeated visits, my experience of those places has changed, and the prints I have been making expose a different standpoint in the narrative: while searching for a new way home, I started seeing through my own camera.