The Notion of Home and the Diasporic Subject: Memory and Forgetting in Allan deSouza’s Lost Pictures Series
Lisa Piazza
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
(Estados Unidos)
What does the word home mean to the post-colonial diasporic subject? How do one’s memories of home shape one’s identity? What is omitted from such memories and what is retained? In this paper I examine two photographs from Allan deSouza’s The Lost Pictures series from 2004 in order to demonstrate some of the ways in which memory and forgetting shape the diasporic subject’s sense of home. Bringing together Roland Barthes’s notion of home as a time when mother and child were one and Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject I suggest that The Lost Pictures series represents a notion of home concerned with issues of identity and gender rather than a precise geographical location. Born to South Asian parents in Nairobi, Kenya deSouza’s family left for London when he was seven years old in the hopes of a better life far from the political and racial tensions in Kenya.
Later deSouza moved to New York before settling in Los Angeles. Having called three continents home qualifies the artist as the quintessential diasporic subject. For The Lost Pictures series deSouza made prints of family photographs taken by the artist’s father in Kenya, which were then taped to various surfaces of deSouza’s home allowing them to absorb both organic and inorganic detritus. The resulting photographs illustrate a blurry amalgamation of past and present mimicking the process of memory itself wherein traces of the past mingle with fragments of the present.
The Lost Pictures series does not represent a nostalgia for a long lost homeland but rather the photographs attempt to explore an alternate notion of home one that extends beyond geographical borders to one’s ultimate home la maison natale to borrow Gaston Bachelard’s expression. In short, they aim to recall a long forgotten memory. In addition, the detritus of hair and other abject portions of the artist’s body that cover the surface of the photographs signal both the longing for home and the search for personal identity. Ultimately, the photographs attempt to bring together the unimaginable: that is they attempt to illustrate simultaneously the process of both memory and forgetting that is central to post-colonial diasporic identity. .
About Lisa Piazza
Born in Tampa, Florida Lisa Piazza earned her bachelor’s degree in Art History from The Univeristy of South Florida in Tampa, Florida in 2004. Currently, she attends the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she is preparing her Master’s thesis on the eighteenth- century Swiss painter Jean-Étienne Liotard.