Survivance

Survivance began with a question I have been unable to escape since my mother died: what exactly disappears when a person dies? Grief has made the distinction between presence and absence increasingly unstable for me. Someone can cease to exist physically and yet continue to occupy our thoughts, our gestures, our language, even the way we perceive the world. The dead do not simply remain as memories. They continue to change inside us. I think of survivance not as survival, and not as resurrection, but as another condition of being. A presence released from the body, no longer fixed, capable of appearing, dissolving and becoming something else. This work is about my mother, but also about that strange continuity carried by those who remain: the moment when absence itself becomes a form of presence.