A video essay accompanied by a live-performance made in collaboration with Pingkan Polla and Noah Isa Berhitu. By using our first childhood memories as a starting point, all three of them happening around 1999, we looked for a remarkable event that happened that same year.

We centered the essay around the solar eclipse taking place the eleventh of August. The eclipse was visible, with merely a couple of minutes of interval, on multiple places all over the world. Whilst people were curiously watching and memorizing this remarkable natural phenomenon, other personal and sociatal events were also taking place.


2023
Digital and found footage, live-narration, 6'49"

Video Script below:

Noah: I was on a holiday with my mum. She just left my dad because of an affair he'd been in for two years (and because they wouldn't have made each other happy anyway). During this period, it was just my mom and me. One evening it was very hot and I had a vivid dream lying in a children's bed. A shadow, or rather, a posture, appeared in our hotel room. As it came closer I recognized a person, a face, it was my father, standing now at my bedside, slightly bowing over his head. The next morning, I told my mother, only to hear, he wasn't there.

Sofie: our great-grandmother lived with my grandparents in the room with the window facing the street. Me and my brothers visited her often, and while opening the door she greeted us with a smile. “Would you like a cookie?” . We knew we would be asked this question. Before being able to choose which one we wanted from a jar she kept in the drawer underneath her television, she took up her puzzle book and opened it on the very last page. her hand was shaking while trying to trace the outline of our little palms on the paper.

Pingkan: Was it 1998, 1999? The first time I learned how to rollerskate. It was the time when we had to move a lot, so I didn't have many friends. When my dad wasn't home that much, they said he was out working, but why did someone have to kidnap him? When every night my mum slept with her gun under the pillow when we were in Timor Leste. I kept rolling and rolling, there was nothing to do as yeasterday they bombed the school. Or was it a week ago, a month ago? I remember, I was there, in the crowd. Didn't realise we're living the history

First childhood memories:

1999