Virtual Exiles
By Jessica N. Bowles-Martinez
In the past few weeks I have gone to talks by authors who write about
being exiles and have read a lot of books on the topic. The books
always want to express imagery that is hard to get across on text
because it involves using a variety of senses. Often the authors talk
about how a sound, a smell, or an image can transform an everyday
situation into a reminder of another place. This creates a sense of
longing and being divided between too worlds. I thought perhaps that
a web page exploring this issue would be able to reconcile the many
ways that being an exile has impacted people better than these books,
since it wasn't limited to text. Unfortunately, I felt that the books
I read were superior to the content on this site.
The page has some great ideas for what people could potentially contribute,
but the actual contributions don't explore these possibilities. The
page wants to get a diverse mixture of photographs and sound or video
clips from many artists. These contributions would serve to express
what its like to be torn between a current home and feeling like a
significant part is left in another place. The content I saw didn't
seem to take advantage of the possibilities of the different multimedia
options, and left me feeling disappointed.
For reasons not explained on the site there was a focus on people
who used to live in Guyana. Perhaps this is the first stage of the
project and they wanted to keep it from getting too broad all at once,
but this seemed like an odd way to limit the project.
As I went through the contributed works I saw a lot of pictures,
but I didn't know what they were supposed to represent or who took
them. I feel that without some sort of context images alone are not
enough to express a concept as abstract as being an exile.
The layout looks really nice, with black and white photos and a very
clean look. But, I think that perhaps adherence to this look is holding
back the site, for text explaining what I am looking at would ruin
the aesthetics of the page. Also, I am wondering if all the photos
contributed were really black and white or if the site "curators"
decided to make them black and white so it fit in with the rest of
the page. Perhaps I am being too suspicious of the site, but I really
did not get the sense that it is expressing what it means to be an
exile nearly as well as I imagined it could, and am trying to understand
what could have made such a professional seeming sight fail so badly.
Perhaps that is the problem, it is too professional and too together.
The introduction page talks about how being an exile implies being
in a state of confusion and being torn emotionally, yet this site
seems too together. It's too glossy to be a reflection of inner turmoil.
I think the site itself has some great ideas and could perhaps really
provide insight into what it feels like to be an exile. Before it
can achieve that the site needs to get contributions and a format
that creates a tangible sense of what it feels like to be an exile.
Its current package is too distant from emotions and feelings to be
very effective with dealing with such a human issue.