Rooms I’ve Stayed In
2013~
Rooms I've Stayed In is a vernacular photo archive spanning more than a decade of moving. Boarding rooms, guesthouses, spare rooms borrowed from friends, capsule hotels, rumah adat, ship cabins, attics, sofas. Rooms in Toraja and Jatinom and the South China Sea and Barcelona and Akita. The photos exist because I happened to have a camera and happened to remember. Many rooms aren't here. Memory keeps some things and loses others, and that's what this is.
A room is the place where you stopped. Everything else is transit. While you're in it you don't fully register what it's holding: the quality of light at a specific hour, the sound of the street below, the height of the ceiling, where you put your shoes. You only understand what a room held after you've left it.
This project started because I realized I was forgetting them faster than I should. The smallest unit of a life I was living somewhere. Each one built by someone else, briefly occupied by me, briefly mine.
ROOMS I’VE STAYED IN