terrible seasons of youth

Photography diptych of physical collages
120cm x 140cm

The youth collage is a place for expression, a tapestry of memories and symbols of personal identification. Growing up, I would rediscover my friends' ever-changing bedroom walls, covered in cut out magazine pages and endless photo stacks of precious childhood moments.

‘Terrible seasons of youth’ is a photography diptych of handmade collages,  composed of printed stills of my own childhood videos and reclaimed internet footage. In this project, I explore the idea of youth in America– its playfulness, violence, desires and longing. As a child of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, growing up between the USA and Europe, I was fed in both worlds the same American imagery brought to us on TV. By collecting recurring symbols and esthetics of American cultural youth values, I paint a cliché of such a childhood, which, thanks to popular visual media, is already part of our visual knowledge, ingrained in our minds and memories.

The TV here serves as a metaphor for how private and public worlds converge through popular visual mediums. How media is the foundation for zeitgeist, and simultaneously a vessel to escape it, oftentimes through fabricated nostalgia by using common memories of youth.

The unintentional eeriness and nostalgic effect of these images work as a reflection of how, through the perspective of adulthood, we perceive youth– its uncanniness, fugacity and fragile beauty.