I returned to my maternal grandparents’ home in Plüderhausen, a small town in southern Germany, in 2021 to begin an ongoing exploration of family and memory. I had visited many times before as a child, spending a summer alone there when I was thirteen with a little pink camera my grandfather bought me, taking self-portraits throughout the house. Returning as an adult, I found myself listening differently. Since I grew up away from my extended German family in the United States, this project draws on my discoveries about my family during talk sessions with my grandparents. Their stories include history from the Second World War, family dynamics, conservative religious beliefs, customs around food, gendered patterns of abuse, and invisible psychological or physical illnesses.
Engaging my grandparents in a form of photo-therapy, including photo-elecitation interviews, reaffirmed my belief that trauma is passed down through generations. For example, my grandfather’s experience of evacuation from Stuttgart due to heavy bombing, to live away from his parents in a family of strangers in the Schwabish Alps, directly impacted my mother’s upbringing. In turn, this affected how I was raised, inheriting wounds from a culture that I grew up outside of. Alongside these inherited traumas runs another recurring motif in my family history, the appearance of the cuckoo’s egg. My grandfather’s sister was a foster child, his brother later adopted a child from Korea, and decades afterward, my parents adopted my sister from Ethiopia. Each generation has, in its own way, expanded what family means, challenging traditional notions of bloodline and belonging. This sentiment reflects the fact that trauma lives on in the body, rather than solely in the archive.
Engaging my grandparents in a form of photo-therapy, including photo-elecitation interviews, reaffirmed my belief that trauma is passed down through generations. For example, my grandfather’s experience of evacuation from Stuttgart due to heavy bombing, to live away from his parents in a family of strangers in the Schwabish Alps, directly impacted my mother’s upbringing. In turn, this affected how I was raised, inheriting wounds from a culture that I grew up outside of. Alongside these inherited traumas runs another recurring motif in my family history, the appearance of the cuckoo’s egg. My grandfather’s sister was a foster child, his brother later adopted a child from Korea, and decades afterward, my parents adopted my sister from Ethiopia. Each generation has, in its own way, expanded what family means, challenging traditional notions of bloodline and belonging. This sentiment reflects the fact that trauma lives on in the body, rather than solely in the archive.
My photographic work relates to the concept of postmemory as theorized by Marianne Hirsch. Postmemory describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before. It explains how my body “remembers” experiences I only had through the stories, images, and behaviors of my family members. Das Kuckucksei, or Cuckoo's Egg fuses my therapeutic self-portraiture practice with the photo-therapy I use to engage my family.
The series began as a way to highlight my grandparents and me, as characters with intertwined trajectories despite the physical distance between us for much of our lives. Now that my grandfather passed away in 2023, the narrative keeps extending, bringing in my sister Katherine, my father, and my mother, to think through all of our collective connection to German-ness at large. I have attached this work to the German preposition “zu”. Zu indicates where someone or something is headed and occurs both in Zufall, chance, and in Zukunft, future. As my family’s formation was an occurrence of zufall, so is my zukunft, and who becomes a part of my family now is completely up to chance. My work comes from a very personal place, yet it resonates with anyone who has ever felt like a cuckoo's egg—out of place in their own home, detached from their family, or grappling with their cultural identity. With my camera, I will continue to search for the source of this feeling within myself.
The series began as a way to highlight my grandparents and me, as characters with intertwined trajectories despite the physical distance between us for much of our lives. Now that my grandfather passed away in 2023, the narrative keeps extending, bringing in my sister Katherine, my father, and my mother, to think through all of our collective connection to German-ness at large. I have attached this work to the German preposition “zu”. Zu indicates where someone or something is headed and occurs both in Zufall, chance, and in Zukunft, future. As my family’s formation was an occurrence of zufall, so is my zukunft, and who becomes a part of my family now is completely up to chance. My work comes from a very personal place, yet it resonates with anyone who has ever felt like a cuckoo's egg—out of place in their own home, detached from their family, or grappling with their cultural identity. With my camera, I will continue to search for the source of this feeling within myself.