DEEPROOTFILM

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

 

The beauty of travel is in the transience of the experiences that come to pass while on the road – this is what I found in the making of "Wait.” Last June, my friend Natalia sensed that she would soon close one chapter of her life and be transitioning to the next, after having lived abroad in Chile for 2 years. She decided that in the interim, she wanted to journey home to Colombia, to where her family was, and I tagged along, ostensibly to document the trip. Ultimately, however, I discovered that the four-week trip became as much about the process of finding home on the road as it was about finding ways to get there, wherever "there" was. "Wait" is my reflection of that process. By traveling through South America with no real itinerary, meeting strangers and hearing their stories, we were journeying toward an endpoint that was inextricably tied to both a nostalgia for the past and a longing for the future. Recognizing that gave us a new appreciation for that third member of the time-continuum trifecta: the present. Every single moment of life, I realized, we find ourselves longing for something, but the only way to truly miss another time is to be completely in the present. And so, during our travels -- sometimes by train, sometimes by foot, and sometimes by way of a kindly truck driver -- I reflected upon what it truly meant to live "in the present." As we made our way through the landscape, what was once the future was in the next moment the present -- and just as quickly, the past. Time, it turned out, really was fleeting.

 

Fast-forward to nearly one year after the trip's end, after we'd reached Natalia's family coffee farm by her birthday (our only real goal), and as I look back upon our adventures, I realize that my memories from the trip are just that now: memories. I had followed someone else’s journey home in hopes that it might give me more of a sense of where my own home could be. And in the end, it wasn't home that I found, but another kind of clarity. For what is life if not a constant struggle to make sense of the past and the future in relation to the ever-changing present? Of an ongoing search for home?