“I love the snow. It helps me connect so much with this feeling of migration… past, future, and present and, you see the steps, but there is no one there.”
Joana grew up in Portugal, volunteered in Italy, and now lives in Denmark. She finds herself mixing together the four languages she now speaks, sometimes purposely, sometimes by habit. Moving between countries has shaped her perception of herself and the world around her. In her recent work, she reflects on the absence that comes with migration; how we understand belonging when we make a home out of movement.
She crochets a top, its structure like a web spiraling out from the chest. “How disappointed are we, how disappointed are we, how disappointed are we…,” the fabric says in crocheted binary patterns. “How disappointed are we that repeatedly run towards anything,” she hopes the final set will say.
“How tired are we of repeating the same mistakes,” Joana explains, “My father is an immigrant, and it was painful to see him leave all the time, but now I’m the one leaving all the time and, now he doesn’t want me to be here, but he’s still an immigrant himself… I think it is about this exploration of what you feel when you’re not where you belong and you find yourself belonging to a place that is not yours.”
But for Joana this absence isn’t only loss. The web also works as a cocoon. “It’s kind of something that traps you, but it also protects you… We’re all absence. And everything that we are living will always build absence. And we’re so scared of it. Of abandonment and of rejection and everything. But it builds us stronger actually. We talk about absence with so much weight. And I think it’s kind of beautiful that you can put the weight on something that is kind of fragile as well: like yarn. It’s soft and it’s beautiful.”
Even in absence, she finds form and memory. The weight of migration settles into something softer but more resilient: “I love love love the snow. There was movement, there was presence.”
