In I am not there, personal memories and family recordings of the past are haunting the present. Video8 fragments of a day as a child are superimposed with images thirty years later; the look through the viewfinder onto the empty spaces of the present collides with the look of the father through the viewfinder back then.
Just as the mind assembles images of the past, connects them to perceptions of the present and imaginations of the future, analog film materialises what Freud called the primary process: it collapses stable representations of linear time and space into a prismatic collage of images that physically relate to the actual event and create a new one, as material object and projected light here and now.
The film as a physical object bears the imprint not only of images but of its development by hand. The film is a camera original and the images will slowly fade from projection to projection, just as memories gradually vanish and make room for new ones.
