If Not Here, Then Where

“If Not Here, Then Where” reads as the ever-reverberating call for belonging of an outsider looking in. In this photographic series the artists documents her increasing sense of disconnect and restlessness through semi-staged snapshots.

“If Not Here, Then Where” reads as the ever-reverberating call for belonging of an outsider looking in. In this photographic series the artists documents her increasing sense of disconnect and restlessness through semi-staged snapshots reflecting her experience as a neurodivergent woman trying to find her place in a culture increasingly untethered from place. Having grown up in the countryside in Thurgau, where the artist felt unheard and misunderstood all throughout her child- and teenhood, she soon began to travel the world in an attempt to find a place to call home, only to return years later, unsuccessful in her mission. Instead, she had to come terms with the fact that her place of origin will always remain that, even if it has long stopped feeling like home.

The work orbits the condition of non-arrival: a perpetual restlessness that resists resolution and refuses the comfort of place. The persisting experience of moving through the world from its edges, never quite crossing into it. The artist combines shots in the pale, suspended light of dawn with electrified images captured in the night, in an attempt to visually express the duality of loneliness and restlessness. The images occupy threshold moments —neither arrival nor departure, featuring the people closest to her along with passing landscapes. There in the most intimate moments, yet remaining in the position of the observer, she keeps a seemingly unbridgeable distance; an outsider’s posture that has, over time, become a way of seeing: precise, patient, and quietly unreconciled.

“If Not Here, Then Where” asks where people belong who do not belong. It’s an attempt at carving out a place of one’s own through artistic expression.