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Grandma passed away in an August evening. While changing shroud for her, I could still feel her warmth, so real that death seemed unreal.
Grandma was diagnosed with late stage cancer around the same time Covid pandemic began. I was thinking a lot about life and death, and how to preserve grandma’s memory with photography knowing she will leave us soon. Around the same time, I began seeing the world around me with thermal camera, a device that became widely seen in public space in China to surveil people’s temperature, and discovered its ability to record a person’s trace by the heat they left in a place.
I used the thermal camera to carry out a remembrance ritual. I used my body to live like grandma, and recorded the traces of my body - in which her blood runs - on the furniture in her house, the traces of my hands caressing her stuff like how she used to dearly used and kept them, and traces of her existence in the old photographs.
I feel closer to her than ever.
Return
Grandma passed away in an August evening. While changing shroud for her, I could still feel her warmth, so real that death seemed unreal.
Grandma was diagnosed with late stage cancer around the same time Covid pandemic began. I was thinking a lot about life and death, and how to preserve grandma’s memory with photography knowing she will leave us soon. Around the same time, I began seeing the world around me with thermal camera, a device that became widely seen in public space in China to surveil people’s temperature, and discovered its ability to record a person’s trace by the heat they left in a place.
I used the thermal camera to carry out a remembrance ritual. I used my body to live like grandma, and recorded the traces of my body - in which her blood runs - on the furniture in her house, the traces of my hands caressing her stuff like how she used to dearly used and kept them, and traces of her existence in the old photographs.
I feel closer to her than ever.