a + A is a video diptych. On one side of the screen is an expressive fifteen-second looping clip of myself as a child. This clip was extracted from a VHS video tape recording of my ninth birthday. On the other side of the screen is an eleven-and-a-half-minute video of myself at age thirty-one working to perform and reenact younger Ann’s expressions from the home video. The resulting side-by-side loop shows an endless game of mimicry between the two of us.
A Google image search for “recreate childhood photo” yields many examples of adults dressed up as their childhood selves and posing to remake an old photograph. Restaging an old family photo does more than confirm the physical effects of time on the body; it allows the reenactor to revive the image by reanimating the frozen gesture and expression. As Jennifer Allen writes in her essay, “‘Einmal ist keinmal’: Observations on Reenactment,” the body remains the vehicle that can carry the past into the present, that can give the past presence. After all, the reenactment is much closer to the zookeeper’s living charges than the taxidermist’s stilted creatures.”
Yet, despite my sincere attempts in the studio to reenact nine-year-old Ann’s gestures, I find it easier to analyze my younger self than to relate to her. Twenty-two years have transformed me from this young character into an omniscient narrator. I am like Alice and the chess pieces just after she passes through the looking glass: she can see them, but they have no knowledge of her presence. Ultimately, the diptych reveals not only the inevitable transition of the body over time, but also a transition of the internal self, reshaped not just by time, but also by experience