(Apr 06) Video (8:16 mins)

“Chatswood” was completed in 2006 but the sound was collected a year earlier, in September 2005. The video was put together over two trips to Australia to visit my 94 year-old grandmother Brenda, where she lives in a retirement home in Chatswood, a northern suburb of Sydney.

The disjointed narrative is the result of my own editing in post-production of an hour of my grandmother’s recollections. As she spoke she frequently confused her generations and the details of her anecdotes – her husband became her grandfather; her son stopped by to visit in his car before he had been born – creating a new set of connections somewhere between memory and invention. My editing work parallels her act of recollection to make a story that is both looser and tighter than its original, and reluctant at every turn to give itself up altogether to the memories that began it. My act of appropriating and reinterpreting my grandmother’s stories – my own family history – reflects the peculiar disjointed continuity that binds and divides the generations of a family.