The kids are alright
Leaving home, leaving your city, your family, even your country. There is a sense of liberation in taking the leap into the unknown, outside the zone and boundaries set by one-self.
While the eerie excitement of the ephemeral fades, the time might come where the longing for home takes over. And with it, the challenging inability to define it. Touched by an unutterable nostalgia of present time, one looks for memories and meaning in moments that are not yet gone, while battling the idea of an impossible return.
“How do I come home after a so long absence? Am I still the same? Are they? Do they carry on living while I am not thinking of them?”
Elodie Grethen left her hometown in Lorraine, France for Vienna at the age of 20. Originally supposed to spend a semester abroad, she has been living there for almost ten years, however without never making the conscious decision to stay. Experiencing illnesses and aging of her family from a distance, she is discovering homesickness. Through the series, she revisits places of her childhood in the search for lost eternity and moments that have long past. Hoping to define her own sense of home, she questions the relationship to her family and the dynamic in place while collecting candid moments.
Imposing the camera in the room, she also forces relatives and loved ones into taking part of a dialogue that both never knew how to start.
The series is a never ending work-in-progress, an infinite journal that she picks up during her infrequent stays in Lorraine. As she is confronted with her own mortality and the one of her kin, there is a felt urgency, a need to photograph the present, which constantly slips away. It is a mean of maintaining balance and saying “it has happened”.
While the eerie excitement of the ephemeral fades, the time might come where the longing for home takes over. And with it, the challenging inability to define it. Touched by an unutterable nostalgia of present time, one looks for memories and meaning in moments that are not yet gone, while battling the idea of an impossible return.
“How do I come home after a so long absence? Am I still the same? Are they? Do they carry on living while I am not thinking of them?”
Elodie Grethen left her hometown in Lorraine, France for Vienna at the age of 20. Originally supposed to spend a semester abroad, she has been living there for almost ten years, however without never making the conscious decision to stay. Experiencing illnesses and aging of her family from a distance, she is discovering homesickness. Through the series, she revisits places of her childhood in the search for lost eternity and moments that have long past. Hoping to define her own sense of home, she questions the relationship to her family and the dynamic in place while collecting candid moments.
Imposing the camera in the room, she also forces relatives and loved ones into taking part of a dialogue that both never knew how to start.
The series is a never ending work-in-progress, an infinite journal that she picks up during her infrequent stays in Lorraine. As she is confronted with her own mortality and the one of her kin, there is a felt urgency, a need to photograph the present, which constantly slips away. It is a mean of maintaining balance and saying “it has happened”.
