what makes a house a home?
.
.
.
In April of 2022, my family had the rare opportunity to revisit the Philippines, our native country, after 14 years since we immigrated to Canada. We reunited with family, revisited familiar places, explored new ones, and during that time, I had documented our reunion on my camera. A collection of photos which were taken during our stay at my paternal and maternal grandparents’ houses stand out to me today and is the focus of What Makes a House a Home?
In my continuous search for the meaning of home and belonging as an artist and racialized immigrant, I’ve found definitive answers elusive. Instead I hope to live out and honor the versions of home that continue to come in and out of my life.
.
.
.
My family’s visit to the Philippines was chaptered by our stopovers to Marikina (my paternal grandfather’s home) and Batangas (my maternal grandparents’ home).
Along with my camera I also carried a journal to express the overwhelming and complex emotions of being back at the place I once and continue to call home. In it I wrote, “seeing Lolo’s (grandfather) house in Marikina was like uncovering a deeply buried dream. The details once shapeless, sharpened, the colors once constantly changing, became vivid blues, deep browns and vibrant pinks. Everything felt alive, everything was breathing.”
I discovered it was a sharp contrast to that of Batangas: “The home in Batangas had changed, the streets unrecognizable, once a peaceful oasis was now rumbling with traffic and noise of the city. The memories I had of the place have now completely gone. Unlike Marikina, Batangas was no longer the place I remember.”
When comparing the two experiences, I mourned the changes that my memories of home in Batangas had undergone and was comforted by my longing for familiarity in Marikina.
However, it wasn’t until much later, that I had re-observed my feelings and these photos more thoroughly and saw this experience in a new light.
Where Batangas had drastically changed, Marikina appeared unchanged. In my revisiting of these photos I came to realize that Marikina was partly imbued with something that preserved the house in time since the year my Lola passed away in 2016: grief. Since then my Lolo’s house in Marikina acted as a time capsule. My Lola’s presence and my Lolo and family’s grief could be found in the things unchanged.
After speaking with my mother, I uncovered another revelation: the renovations I found jarring in Batangas were made by my Lolo to accommodate our stay. Knowing there wouldn’t be enough room for our whole family during our visit, they were readying the house for our arrival. My mother tells me that during our stay, my Lolo once told my father, “everyone can live here now.”
When I look back at the photos I took, I see distinctly the 2 experiences of returning to my paternal and maternal grandparents’ houses, places which formed much of my childhood memories and the images I identified as home: the shock of change in Batangas, and the grief in what remained unchanged in Marikina. The former: home looks different, the latter: home feels different.
In both, home has changed indefinitely.