Calling cards always sat in a bowl at the entrance of our childhood homes, from Uganda to Egypt and Palestine, through various lands and onto Turtle Island. For separated families, calling cards were a way to witness a connection across generations and displacements, from here to wherever home is. With a global pandemic restructuring the world, communications have not only been a window into the past but have also woven a canvas of growing modes of future connections and new ways to share, speak, and recall places. +1-home is a digital platform on which our practices as experimental filmmakers amalgamate with a digital installation of non-linear space, time, and storytelling. Comprised of a mosaic of calling cards in which textures become spaces and narratives become multiplicities, we turn into shadows and each of us can navigate, observe, remember, relate, listen, learn, feel, reconvene, reconnect, and give ourselves environments in which we can reflect on what really brings us together, on our own time, in our own way, and in the in-betweens. Building from our process and the idea of a walking archive, each calling card attempts to convey space through our senses because that is where we feel we most belong, are allowed to speak, and are given the space to archive. Within each room, a conversation takes place. Repetitions, patterns, connections, and weavings occur, one to the next, in whichever order arises. Time is your choice, space your companion, you, the archive. As our stories live in physically different places, a simple calling card unites our bodies once more.
“There is a card that I carry in my wallet, it used to bend around the curves of a golden metallic bowl placed on the outer left corner of a square wooden table by the front door of our apartment. In it, nails, batteries, pens, keys, a small notebook, cigarettes, matches, coins, and a lighter would flop in and out, depending on who was home. Always, without fault, if you swept your small hand along the valley of the curved brass, your fingertips would hit a thin little card with a different design than the last one. Bodies shift, they grow, change, recover, hurt, and leave, but I’ve carried the calling card you had left at the bottom of that bowl for years. On my way out, when the bowl ended up in a box and you left it in a storage unit, I remember the moment I placed it in my wallet and I thought, do you think it’ll still work and I could call you? I have my own bowl now, and in it I lose all the things I would rummage through as a child.
Thank you, for being our archives, and showing us how to create our own. Here is our calling card. Talk to you soon.
Love,
Sonya & Nada
