Along with many of its other challenges, the year of 2020 pushed me to control how deeply my complex global identity relies on the life of international travel. Continually having to relocate for the sake of work/education, as well as to visit family and friends that are scattered worldwide, I had grown used to the emotionally draining experience of incessantly packing and moving from country to country.
With strict COVID-19 induced travel protocols, I began to specifically reflect on how the pandemic unexpectedly flipped lives of immigrants or international students like myself, who not only faced the difficulty of being displaced from or confined in their apartments like everyone else, but also were being held down in a place they may not consider to be their homes.
As someone that usually packs a suitcase on a monthly basis to travel abroad, my quarantine-induced restlessness spurred me to create a 4 part modular sculpture that slots even the most unlikely, and seemingly unrelated array of objects/materials together like a puzzle or game of Tetris— similarly to the way one would maximize the number of items they can carry on a flight with one suitcase or moving box.