○ I AM A TRAVELER
Weaving together performance, poetry, and photography, ‘I am a Traveler’ is the retelling of my diasporic origin story: the ongoing creation of a self-mythology to make sense of my life post-rupture. Uprooted from the Earth and born in flight, I learned to find my way through the dark and follow the fractalizing paths back to the core.
CREATIVE DIRECTED AND MODELED BY LUCY MU LI
PHOTOGRAPHED BY XIAOCHEN ZOU
ASSISTED BY HOLLIE RUTH
120mm film photographs, 2024
‘I am a traveler. I arrived here from beyond the horizon. My ancestors foresaw my birth across the sea, and although they knew it would not be easy, they knew one day I would find my way back through the webs and veins that hold all memory of life on Earth.
And so to return home, I became a traveler.
In the process of rooting I have traveled far and deep, dug my roots towards Earth’s core and followed rivers back to the sea. I translate between realms of Self and Earth, Here and There, Living and Dead — moving through the marrow, the subterranean sea.
I am a child of this Earth, and I have much to learn. I learn to read her rhythms, and in turn, she teaches me of mine. The first principle of this work, she tells me, is devotion. Only by returning again and again do we learn to love deeply, do the currents become known to us.
So for the last few years, I have lived here, deep in the world of where land meets sea. I have sat at the shoreline where stones gather in thousands, singing songs with the churning winter tides. In the spring I say goodbye, and come summer they have all gone to the deep. Year after year, we sing a similar song. I resonate with stone, for they are the travelers from the beginning of time. And with time, I learn all the many faces of my kin — I have made myself a family, one of sand and stone, wind and water.
A home for a traveler is carved, not given. But my ancestors followed me across the ocean, and they have taught me how to see. Their vision is my inheritance, carved into my bones like water in stone. They teach me that here and there and everywhere, there are portals I can follow to remember myself whole again. Earth, you see, is a fractal. Every path leads to the molten core.
There is only to listen, for no one is lost on the spiral path.’
*This is an excerpt from my emerging mythology I am a Traveler (still in progress).