2019
Nine-channel video installation
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The Stories is a nine-episode video installation piece. I did this project at the time I was living in Zurich. All featured videos are connected through the core concept of how our environment (e.g., family, school, internet, etc.) influences our sexual orientation as we age. I decided to reach out to different people to hear about their experience and how it may have shaped their opinion about these environmental influ¬ences. My goal was to talk to people of different genders and sexual orientations, hoping to find various, perhaps even contrasting, perspectives. In addition, I tried to reach out to people of different nationalities whenever possible to further diversify the responses I was getting. One of the challenges was to build up intimacy with people whom I did not know or knew very little, in a short span of time. This meant that I had to find a way to get them to trust me. To avoid the rigid question and answer routine of standard interviews, I decided to look at myself as a participant as well. By the end of this process, I had managed to collect audio and video recordings of all or parts of each conversation.
With the material I had collected, I decided to conceive an artwork. I tried to make some videos in a story telling format. To accomplish this, I started with the audio files. I picked nine out of 19 meetings, with special attention to diversity and the quality of the conversations. I had a fixed frame video of most of the meetings as well. The videos contain a specific angle of the space where I was speaking to my participants, while we remain outside the frame. I edited each conversation as a separate episode to be screened singularly. I also use one headphone for each video to create a one-on-one relationship between the narrator and the visitor. As the information shared in these videos is often from the private