I could sit in the bathroom for hours. It was my way to escape.
Back then I used to be weak and small compared to you. You always were strong. I only saw you crying several times in all these years.
I felt panicked seeing your weakness.
One day you changed the rules and I had to adopt them. No explanation, no talk, nothing to help me understand what was going on.
I could not go away, could not stay. Sometimes I hated you for making me feel this way.
I was watching you cross highways without looking sideways and cars stopping at your feet. I followed you.
I was afraid to lose you.
I was going crazy imitating your poses and breathing with the same speed just to catch a glimpse of what you were feeling.
I grew up. I don`t try to save you anymore. I learnt to trust in you and accept you - the whole of you.
Because I can`t live your life and can`t give you mine.
I just want you to know that every dream I pursue is to light a desire for life in you.
Embrace grew out of experiences between 2009 and 2014, during the years following my parents' divorce. The photographs and accompanying texts were created in 2014. I was fifteen when they separated, and during the years that followed the roles within our family began to shift. I found myself taking on a caring position and, in different ways, trying to become “a mother for my mother.” Photography became a way of approaching experiences that were difficult to speak about directly. I observed my mother’s gestures and physical states and sometimes reproduced them with my own body. The photographs move between observation and identification, daughter and caregiver, her body and mine. The short texts paired with the images come from particular memories between us. I wrote them in English, which gave me a degree of distance from material that felt much more immediate in my native language. Over time, the project shifted from an attempt to enter another person’s experience toward an acknowledgement of its limits. However closely we identify with someone we love, there remains a point beyond which we cannot follow them. Embrace sits within that distance: between intimacy and separation, shared memory and private experience.