latent impressions (portals into my consciousness)

i have always been fascinated by what i cannot remember... and that age-old question: who am i? this is what re-membering looks like. until mid-august 2012, i only had one small, black & white photograph of myself before the age of 27 months. the date it was taken and my age in it is unknown. it was attached to my adoption file... my only link to my past. my life essentially began the day i was adopted... no one could tell me what had happened to me before that, where i came from, who i was, or what had happened to my family. after i was adopted, there were many photos taken of me, all in color. over the years, i would often sit and return to that small photo... holding it, looking into the little girl's sad, haunted eyes, and think: what happened to you? where do you come from? why are you so sad? what have you witnessed? what have you experienced? what is your story? the photo spoke to the dark, tormented, abandoned spaces inside me... unbeknownst to me, it was singing me back... and one day i answered its call... i started a birth family search... on my first trip back to korea, i was given 5 more black & white photos of me by my adoption agency in seoul... again the dates and my age were unknown... i met my birth father... and an aunt... and a niece... and later cousins... and then an uncle... and they each told me stories of what they could remember about me or stories that they had heard... but memories were foggy... details were blurry... dialogues were lost in translation... i returned home and tried to assimilate all this new information about me... i became disorientated... i felt lost with all these new elements about my life... none of it felt like a part of me... i went back to korea again... this time i met my birth mother... and an uncle... and a cousin... more information, but also so limited... by my mother's muteness... by my uncle's blindness... by the expanse of years that stretched in between... i kept trying to piece together all the different stories... some were contradictory... some took my breath away... some created more questions... it was endless... and i kept going back to korea... again and again... and again... searching, discovering... and uncovering... looking and asking... listening and feeling... trying to find all those missing parts of myself... to bring them together to a unified, comprehensible whole... to find some peace with all those fragmented pieces... latent impressions are still lifes of stilled life... moments in time constructed by the stories that were told to me in my birth family reunions... and of my internal spaces... imprints that i had always carried hidden deep inside me... it is an act of re-membering my life and my selves... of making my unconscious conscious...