NOSTOS
Nostos is a photo-poetry book in which I use the lens of photographing my two grandmothers, both of whom were residing in Shanghai hospices, in conjunction with an extended essay-poem to better understand the different ways nostalgia manifests and my complex relationship with Shanghai as an individual of diaspora. There are 70 editioned copies.This paper examines nostalgia in Nostos, and nostalgia’s existence as a theoretical global condition arising from displacement, looking at nostalgia specifically not as a yearning for home, but a yearning for a lost sense of feeling at home. It traces the lineage of image-text hybrid art practices and examines the significance of conveying meaning through both synergistically. It studies the psychoanalytic process of transforming loss into object, or absence into presence, ultimately using the object as a lens to view oneself and the way in which nostalgia manifests itself.
