In 2007 I dragged my family to Sweden We were all tired of our country that (it was said) was afraid of existing writes Maria in the beginning paragraph of her essay about her move from Portugal to Sweden
But the journey portrayed here happens four years later when I accompany her in a farewell journey between Malmö and Stockholm before she moved with her family this time from Sweden to the UK
A travelogue a photo-text in search of its ontology a book that essays photographs and writing into the double-vision of the migrants’ eyes (annunciated by Bhabha) hers and mine
A twofold vision so as to twice the number of doubles produced on paper folds causing creases to appear temporarily in the folders of memory
Where does the journey start?
With portraits of the dead photo-traces of transnational migration found in Malmö’s Urban Cemetery across the road from her home in Söder Innerstad housing programme for the newly arrived migrants
Suitcases hand-luggage passport control check points inter-continental flights
trajectories of dispersal the splitting up of a people leaving in different directions to meet later on in foreign soil
for another expedition
Nothing to undo- self-contradictory error message on the screen caused by accidentally activating the ‘shake to undo’ feature in the iPad something is required to do: to tap the ‘cancel’ button to close it Nothing to undo: the paradoxical nature of their collaboration that left much to images and words to collide Nothing - not anything; no single thing: no amount; zero To - a sense of movement, how we travel to, have gone to and relate to one another Undo - untie, loosen, cancel, reverse
An ambiguity between agency and passivity acceptance of contingency and chance The absence of necessity the fact of being so without having to be so Both in life and in the essay There’s nothing one can undo no ‘one single home’ to return to but scattered locations multiple homes /pages to go to
A trip but not the mythical American road trip closer to the one intended by Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland when in 1935 they hit the road in their practice run for the photobook America. The 48 States They hoped to produce
Not a picture book not a treatise or a burst of splendid rhetoric with illustrations not a series of beautifully reproduced plates with tabloid captions and tricks of montage but a book with words and photographs marching along beside each other complimenting each other reinforcing each other…
It could be the great democratic book the great book for the masses of people conditioned by reading newspapers and tabloids…
In their daily drifts into Ribersborg beach and Vestra Hamnen (western harbour), former industrial area converted into the City of Tomorrow, they passed by the Rotating Torso tower and the Facelift Centre obvious symbols of the new prosthetic architecture of artificially enhanced corporeality
They never asked themselves: Why are we here? Will we ever go back?
Two women on the road self-consciously documenting their situated dis-embodied geographies
paula roush: excerpt from photo-text index, Nothing to Undo 2015