What Remains

"What Remains" manifests as vertical textile-wrapped birch trees, standing witnesses that occupy space as displaced bodies might: suspended, vulnerable, yet undeniably present. These organic forms, embraced by weathered fabrics bearing traces of former lives, function as material testimony to the painful journey of displacement—a reality that continues to uproot millions while leaving enduring wounds.
 

The work reinterprets these natural elements through layers of textile memory, each wrapping revealing partial narratives through frayed edges, saturated reds, and careful binding. The verticality creates a forest of testimony, inviting viewers to move between histories that refuse neat categorization.
 

These textile-wrapped birch columns exist as monuments to human displacement. They hover between collapse and persistence, neither fully intact nor completely unraveled. Their suspension in gallery space mirrors the liminal existence of those denied stable homes, creating tensions between weightlessness and gravity, permanence and impermanence.
 

The installation demands we recognize how displacement inscribes itself on bodies and materials alike. These columns hold contradictions: they are simultaneously dwellings and barriers, borders and passages, remnants and beginnings. The work asks: What remains when home becomes impossible? How do we carry cultural memory when physical spaces are denied? Where do we locate belonging when systems of power determine whose right to home is recognized?

This installation was exhibited at the Mississauga Festival of Trees, supported by CreativeHub 1352, at the Small Arms Inspection Building, Mississauga, Ontario, 2024.