Project completed as a 2025 Storytellers Institute Fellow

Installation at Schick Gallery, Saratoga Springs NY

When given a month of space to work on a project in my hometown of Saratoga Springs, I knew I wanted to spend some time documenting my family while I had access to a few basements worth of history before leaving the town for good in the Fall. I was initially drawn to the idea that people don’t fully die until they are forgotten, hoping to collect stories about my great grandparents as a way to both preserve their individualities as well as give me insight into my living family, showing me the spaces they came from. My grandparents and I recovered a collection of 1930s photos from the Italian community in Mechanicville, NY belonging to my great grandmother, Mary. The nameless faces in these photos struck me, reasserting the urgency of my desire to protect them from the abandonment of time.
While going through my parents’ old photos, I discovered in my mother’s belongings instructions for a “soul retrieval.” She later explained to me that this was a part of her work as an energy healer; she would enter an altered state to find lost parts of clients’ souls that had left them during moments of trauma. The reintegration of these parts back into one’s soul was an act of healing.

There seemed to be something intrinsically connected between my mother’s spiritual approach to soul retrieval, and my own desire to retrieve the hidden parts of individuals through archival research. For her, it was to heal. For me, it’s to preserve. Both protect a soul from becoming lost.

I spent the past month engaging in family research through oral history interviews with my mother and her parents and digitizing old photos from their collections. On display are risograph prints I made from scans of my parents’ photos from their three-month trip to Australia. My mother asked my father to go with her on their second date to find and learn from a sound healer, and this chance decision to invite an acquaintance across the world with her is where I can trace back and locate the beginning of my becoming. Handwritten on these prints are transcriptions of my interviews with my mother and her parents, though I chose to refrain from sharing the speakers’ identities.

As I continue to work with family content, I find myself questioning when these stories should be private, and when they should be shared with a public audience; when is it purely personal, and when can there be more universal representation in my family’s stories? For this iteration of the project, I believe the individual accounts are not as important for a viewer as what these accounts show us: glimpses of a family’s shared connection with the unknowable, defined by my grandparents as God, my mother as the Universe, and myself as Time. The quotes show serendipitous meetings that initiated new lives, reflections on motherhood, and memories of lost loved ones.

Scattered across the walls are the old 1930s photos from my great grandmother. Projected are edited versions of these images with their subjects removed in absolute and in parts, visualizing the atrophy of being forgotten. Herkimer Diamonds, the "Little Falls Diamonds" that were first discovered in my grandfather's hometown, are sprinkled around the installation. The crystal contains layers of meaning in my family. Rusting railroad spikes frame the walls, once a part of a linear track but found outside the lines after being cast aside. Their metallic discoloration mirrors the silvering of the vintage prints, the traces of the two materials’ corrosion parallel. Mary’s husband, my great grandfather, spent most of his life as a railroad repairman. His sudden death shortly after retirement left a trauma on his family. I learned about it just last week.

a retrieval of parts asks the viewer to reflect upon their own family histories; Who has time abandoned? Who can you still save?

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