Faraway/Close

The streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland have seen decades of war and bloodshed with a history marred with tragedy. As I walked around the streets, I couldn’t help but notice this heaviness in the air regarding the various tragedies this city has experienced like the sinking of the Titanic (once a crown jewel for Belfast), the WW-2 Blitz (bombings from German forces) destroying thousands of houses in the city and more recently ‘The Troubles’ decades of civil unrest and war among British Protestants and Irish Catholics. A peace agreement was eventually signed back in 1998 and the British Army finally moved out of the city by 2005 as hundreds of locals celebrated the occasion in the streets. Now, Belfast needed to look forward and it surely did. Fast forward to 2021, the city appears just like any other modern European city and maybe even better. Surely enough, the decades of war and conflict are bound to leave some scars and only time can heal that.

Faraway/close is a photography project dedicated to the city of Belfast exploring how the differences & scars of the distant past still seem so close. The neighborhoods of Shankill Road and Falls Road might look so close on the map but the wall (called Peace Wall) represents the vast distance in the ideology of these two sections of the society. The vision for this project was to observe the art of memorizing and remembering (method of loci) in practice here as hundreds of murals and places serve as the hard-hitting reminder of what these streets have witnessed and still deeply care about. 

“The method of loci involves constructing visual images for items to be remembered and then placing them at spatially discrete locations in a familiar building or along a known path. The items are then recovered from memory by mentally retracing one's steps.”

From murals memorizing the legendary IRA (Irish Republican Army) member Bobby Sands who starved himself to death after 66 days on hunger strike to horror stories from Crumlin Road Goal prison - Belfast has the kind of story that will move you, 

Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young!

-Text from a mural on Shankill Street, Belfast