2017 was my last year living in Minnesota before moving to Pennsylvania to start my masters degree. I was working part time jobs, planning for my move, and taking stock of my time in the Midwest. It was the place of my origin in a physical sense. My parents emigrated from the Caribbean Island of Antigua, trading the familiar surroundings of their home to give me a chance to move in a new way.
What other information is necessary to convey the relationship between a person and a place? Through conversations with my parents and grandmother I began to get a picture of the circumstances of their origins, separated from mine by decades and thousands of miles. Their decision to change their surroundings holds as much information about the world as any map or record of a building.
I wanted to understand my relationship to Minnesota by understanding the decisions and circumstances that led me to that point. Maps, city plans, and building records have information about a certain type of relationship to physical land. The hopes, dreams and values of those who have the privilege to make decisions about their surroundings get recorded in physical space, and then again when we tell the story of why that is so.
