Where could we go: A MAP OF FINDING HOME
Looking Back. Dreaming Ahead. Telling Our Story of Now.
What does it mean to be free? What is the cost of survival? How does our inheritance affect the way we move through the world and our ability to live the full expression of ourselves in our own skin and with each other? What does home mean to us and is it possible to be fully at home anywhere? Starting in the summer of 2020 from our shared residence on Chicago’s northside, we began asking what home means in our bodies, hearts, and minds.
Co-Creators Echaka Agba and Kristina Valada-Viars
We create short films around our experiences as nearby as our back porch and as far away as our ancestral homes. Conceived as a 6-part narrative/documentary anthology series, Where Could We Go begins by investigating our own family histories of leaving and making home. We speak to family, blood and found, of our shared experiences of dreaming our way forward to a more desirable future. We place ourselves in traditions of Queer utopian imagination as story cartographers of time and space. Prioritizing joy and beauty in our lives and storytelling, we recognize that many places we encounter celebrate or uplift one aspect of our identity while asking another to tolerate a range of abuse from microaggressions to criminality.
Since 2016, we have witnessed the urge in our communities to seek refuge abroad. At a time when a growing political movement of antagonism towards immigrants and their descendants includes the phrase “go home”, we gave ourselves the task of asking where that might mean for us. What is the cost of holding the dysphoric experience of navigating the space between the story a place tells about itself and the reality of living there as a violent crescendo erupts across our home country and the world?
