09 / 09
The Goodbye I Was Not Allowed to Say
The images cannot recover what I missed, but they let me approach an absence I had no way to understand.
When I was a child, an elder in my family passed away, but neither my siblings nor I were allowed to attend the funeral. No one explained why. We were simply told, “Children aren’t allowed to go.” The adults left, and the house fell silent.
Not attending did not mean I could not sense the loss. A seat remained empty. A name was mentioned less often. I did not fully understand death, but I understood disappearance.
Making
Interested in AI’s ability to construct visually convincing parallel realities, I generated a series of photographic images imagining funeral scenes I had never witnessed. Their peeking viewpoints place me close to the rituals while keeping me outside them.
Documentation
No image or video received for this work yet.
The question
Through these fictional scenes, I return to a goodbye I was not allowed to say. The images cannot recover what I missed, but they let me approach an absence I had no way to understand.