things I am not

When I took this photo I was not an immigrant. Now I am. When I took this photo I was a citizen of the EU. Now I am not. When I took this photo, Joana, who helped me to create this image by immersing herself in the River Lee, was a legal resident of the UK. Now she is not. In this project, I was working with artists to capture the impending approach of Britain leaving the EU and their uncertainty, as non-British EU citizens, about their future place in Britain. I could not, at the time, truly feel what they felt, but I wanted to capture it. To give another voice to these artists who the government and the society in which they lived, loved and made art, had rejected.  

 Now I live in a different EU country. It has accepted me by granting me a permanent residency. But I am not a citizen of that country. I am not truly accepted by my colleagues because my views and experience are foreign and thus not seen as equally informed or valid as theirs. I frequently find myself locked out of conversations in meetings as the language switches. Nothing intentional, it just happens. And little by little, I start to understand a bit more of how Joana and the other artists and friends who went through Brexit as legal aliens, were feeling. I am not a citizen of my new home. I am not quite sure what that makes me.