Current Standing

In my current standing, I am working with the idea of hanging onto a memory that I never experienced, and trying to explore this memory through a life I have already lived and known. My mother was born in 1960 in El Salvador, and by the time she was about 11 years old, a civil war had broken out, with the biggest, most traumatic events occurring in the early 1980s. At an even younger age, when she was seven, she and her family (which by this point was broken up due to divorce and reluctance of ownership by her parents) experienced an incredible earthquake, which left them homeless for a time (I am not sure how long of a duration this was). Upon living through a bloody civil war, one of question of authority, natural disasters, and rocky upbringing between intermediate family and relatives, my mother developed several psychological problems. For one, she is a hoarder, and I grew up in a hoarding household, where stepping over piles of who-knows-what, keeping things for “self-defense” or “might come in useful later” or was free, was the norm. Over the years, the problem has gotten worse, and I have totally detached myself from my home back in Arlington.
    Through photographs, I hope to obtain both a documentation of objects/belongings that my mother brought with her from El Salvador, and upon visiting my house in Arlington (which will be a struggle to get to, on account I do not have keys, never have, never will), I hope to document the disaster that has followed me throughout these years, but the piles upon piles never hitting me as fully abnormal. I was always ashamed of never being able to invite anybody over or the oppressive hierarchy that my mother had over us, letting her continue her hoarding, to never question it. She even conned our own father into it. Yet, although hoarding is the problem, I almost want to show some sort of godly quality to it. Her idea of hoarding is not like what people see on Hoarders. Hers comes from a line of mishaps in her life. I want to acknowledge this relation between Salvadoran belongings that we own, in juxtaposition to the state that our life is in. And although this is a tough matter, I need to show my mom some respect and some credit.