July has gotten a whole lot better since PhotoIreland began three years ago. Transforming Dublin into a photography mecca through its all-encompassing programme of exhibitions, book fairs and portfolio reviews, the festival provides the infrastructure needed to encourage photographic practices in Ireland, as well as some aesthetic nourishment. This year, the programme is loosely held together by a theme of ‘Migration’. We spoke to a cross-section of participating photographers about their work: Dinu Li, Jean Revilliard, Isabelle Pateer and David Monahan, as part of a series we’re running across the week.
Dinu Li’s project The Mother of all Journeys sews together, piece by piece, a rich patchwork of memories. Taking its inspiration from bed-time stories told to the photographer as a child this body of work attempts to “exact the very sites of memory”. Leaving us suspended somewhere between past and present Li revisits his family’s journey from China to England through family snapshots, original photographs and his mother’s narration.
You collaborated with your mother on this project. What was it like mixing family and business?
The work was originally conceived as a book project, in which the pages acted as two voices, that of a mother recounting her memories in the form of words, co-existing with a visual means of expression by way of photography. The project could not be realized without my mother’s collaboration, as there were so many places I could not have explored without her guidance.
How do you think it will transfer to the gallery wall if it was conceived as a book project?
It will be presented as a 35mm slide projected installation. Not only does the machine relate to another generation, but the slide projector offers particular characteristics. It will be interesting to see the images fading in and out, as if replicating how memories can sometimes drift in and out of our lives totally unannounced.
It can be a bit of a culture shock when a Westerner visits China and vice versa. When I visited I remember being struck by the fact chicken feet are a snack worthy item just like a bag of crisps is here! Can you remember what coming to the West felt like?
I think the demarcation for reasons of gender appeared quite apparent to me. I remember one school in Manchester had a yellow line in the playground that separated the boys from the girls, and clearly the boys enjoyed 75% more grounds to run around in. I guess communism in China brought about a slightly better sense of fairness amongst male and female. I also remember experiencing snow for the first time when I first moved to England. Walking to school was a journey full of fantastical possibilities. My imagination would lead the way, sometimes in a direction away from school.
In terms of the stories your mother told you, was there a discrepancy between the image you had in your mind and the reality?
Developing the project felt as if I was traveling back and forth in some kind of time machine. Some places such as my parents’ village home have mostly remained as they left it, as if visiting a family museum, where childhood drawings, lovers’ scribbled notes, furniture and curtains remain fixed.
Photography seems like a pretty good medium to deal with the subject of past because once a photo is taken it immediately become a part of history. Did this aspect of photography attract you?
To me, it’s about time and space, the changes that takes place through time and in space at a particular epoch and the circumstances around that epoch. By circumstance, I mean the political, the personal, the social, the environmental, the economical, the local, the global. All those things that we sometimes feel part of, other times disconnected to, at times feeling as if we can control, other times completely out of our hands.
The Mother of all Journeys is quite a personal project yet it can speak to everyone really. Is this something that you thought about- the fact that a person’s identity and histories can be both personal and universal?
When I make a work, I don’t really think about the audience as such, which may well sound selfish. My objective is to make a work that expresses how I perceive the world. I guess the sincerity and immediacy of my practice has enabled audiences to connect to this project. Most of us have messed around with old family photographs inside our biscuit tins. We’ve all considered our parents posing next to each other and wondered who they were before they got married, before they had children, what they would have become if they hadn’t met, if the circumstances around them were different etc.
Dinu Li will be exhibiting at Moxie Studios as part of the On Migration exhibition between July 7th and 15th
