Some photos from the event, taken by Tim Cheney (
www.timcheney.com)
The show was about traveling. Not so much the mechanics of it, but the inward thought and self-discovery found on a long, lonely journey in a foreign place. The photos I exhibited were from 2003-2004, when I lived in Spain for close to a year. Here is the essay, along with a few of the images from the show.
My decision to live in Spain for a year was made quite casually, planned for some distant time in the future, an exciting idea but with no meaning to me in reality at the time. I felt bored and stifled by my life, and I needed to take a detour of some sort. I don’t remember where the idea came from--maybe it was an advertisement I saw or a book I was reading. Either way, I became obsessed with the idea of going to Spain and began planning the escape. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
About two months before I was scheduled to leave, a close friend committed suicide. I spent the following two months in a haze, fumbling around blind to everything around me. I didn’t come to until I was thousands of feet above the ground, looking down at a foreign landscape, and thinking to myself with horror, “What the hell was I thinking?” I was a total mess and, by that point, had forgotten all of the reasons I had originally wanted to leave. I felt more alone than ever before.
It was the end of August when I arrived in Granada, and the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. I wandered the streets, walking in the shadows of awnings and palm trees, inspecting every detail of the city. Granada was quiet—many families were away on vacation, and the students hadn’t yet returned to the city. The lazy, hot air was calming, and I began to notice that life had become interesting. The everyday objects I saw were different than what I was used to—manhole covers, tiled sidewalks, narrow medieval roads that barely fit one car, textures and colors, building materials, even hairstyles; I felt like a child, everything took on a new importance, as I pondered form and function with new eyes.
When many foreigners think of Spain, they imagine bullfights, sangria, beaches, and siestas, but what I see is the energy and life of its people—an energy that I have never been able to find or recreate here in the United States. Its energy came from a polarity, a balance, of life. Lazy, quiet afternoons, and long raucous nights; laid-back attitudes but a raging passion toward social injustice. A culture that, as a whole, places family, friends, and leisure above all else; yet a place where the people take to the streets, united, to protest adversity, instead of cowering inside their homes in fear.
After ten months living and traveling in Spain, I had only hazy memories of my previous life in the States. The me in that past life was someone completely different than who I had become, and the looming date of return made me feel uneasy and restless. A part of me was ravenous for stability--a home, with my own bed and a place for all my stuff, and where I could communicate with people quickly and effortlessly, throwing out words and ideas with sarcasm, subtlety, and slang. But I liked being an alien, it suited me. Every day was filled with new knowledge, every person infinitely more complex and interesting when I couldn‘t understand them. Each word and phrase was an adventure, filled with new symbolism, meaning, and history to learn, and free from clichés and small talk, which, in Spanish were still fresh and new to me.
The homecoming was not quite what I imagined it would be. I now know that they never are. Now back in the States, I was an alien again, but this time in a place where I should have felt at home. Everyone was the same as when I left, and they all expected something from me. I’m not sure what it was, but it definitely wasn’t what they got. Eyes glazed over when I told stories of people I had met, brows furrowed at references to the politics and pop culture of a foreign country, and conversations ended in confusion and silence. My mouth refused to make the transition back to English, and at times I found myself forgetting how to speak coherently.
Within the first week of returning home, I had gone through all of my old things and thrown half of them away. I was overwhelmed by all of the clutter. Not surprising, since I had lived out of a suitcase for close to a year. One of my friends told me that was a normal reaction after returning from such a long journey. I just thought it was wasteful.
All the experiences throughout the previous year were intense, emotional, and eye-opening. I had a gnawing fear that time would take them away from me, dulling the memories and leaving me to slowly forget. It had been an uncomfortable life traveling, living day to day with uncertainty and instability, but it brought with it a raw energy and feeling of purpose that I had never felt before, and I work every day to keep this energy with me.
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