Imagining Home—100 Exercises in Empathy (Part 3) is an ongoing and participatory drawing project inspired by absence, longing, and imagination. I invite people to manipulate a handful of my actual hair and shape it into a landmass that represents an imaginary homeland. This is the same process I used to create my own imaginary homeland. The resulting three-dimensional drawings are then photocopied to create the two-dimensional maps presented here. Together, the work embodies the desires and limitations of representation.

 

The process and the resulting symbols of home explore the complicated relationship between displaced peoples living in diaspora and our tenuous bonds to ancestral homelands. In the wake of attempted colonial erasure, Imagining is both an act of resistance and an exercise in empathy. Select photo documentation by Dan Kvitka.

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Installation views at Russo Lee Gallery, Portland, OR