For so long I have wanted to document my losses, to compile a body of work that I would stare at any time and day and say, ‘yes, there you are: in all your glory and gloom’. I did that with this project the last time I called…, a creative attempt at giving my loss a face, using the mother of all my losses as a tunnel to explore the other ones and the ones I’m scared to incur.
At the heart of my practice is to store memory, to make every element a leading line or hyperlink that leads to something else, that is connected to another memory- a conscious effort at remembrance.
One of the strongest aids to remembrance is imagery. It takes little to no effort to troubleshoot our minds to something when there is a helping hand for that. Grief in itself is a skilful collector in how it takes without permission, and we also need to be crafty in that sense: in taking what we can and holding unto it. We cannot hold our loved ones or our priced possessions from leaving, but we can snatch snippets of the time we had with them and use that as a form of memorial, as a form of eulogy.
And every time we go back to those visual snippets, we are transported back in time- back in that room, that café, that night with no lights, that church service, that last song or film… So do the most with time and document, photograph, write, e.t.c
Photography gives us that leverage to do all of these and I think we should take it with two hands because what is left of the past is documented memory, nothing more and nothing less.
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Ofem Ubi is an Award-Winning Poet, Photographer and Filmmaker. His work has been featured in international publications and film festivals and his debut pamphlet “The Last Time I Called” is available for purchase here. To connect with him on Instagram, click here.
