Familial Ground is an autobiographical installation work that includes digitally altered self-portrait photographs, reproductions of pages from an artist‘s book, videotapes, and aural works. It is about grounding identity within a familial and cultural history subject to erasures, geographic displacements, and cultural dislocations. It is the result of a process of gathering and connecting scattered fragments of a past history while acknowledging the impossibility of complete retrieval.
 
The self-portraits in Familial Ground are detailed reenactments of ancestral figures, and can be understood as acts of "naming" linked to mourning and remembrance. Familial Ground attempts to create a poetic language of mourning through self-portraiture and through the conventions of family portrait photography. They propose a form of intersubjective connection between us, and those we mourn. In reenacting ancestral others through a genetic relationship of resemblance, and through the conventionality of the portrait photograph, the self-portraits in Familial Ground suggest that we look at family photographs in order to know ourselves through the photographic trace left by the lost ancestral other.
 
Familial Ground is the product of a process that started several years ago when my son was born. I gradually realized that my new role as parent included the responsibility to pass on to my son a familial and cultural inheritance, and that such inheritance would need to be gathered and delivered gradually in a manner appropriate to his age. My attempts at articulating histories, cultural and familial, public and private, made me acutely aware of how much I knew of the former, and how little of the latter. I thought of the many erasures that my family history was subjected to, and of the way in which my South American and Jewish educations privileged public histories. As I reached my middle years it became important to not only retrieve basic historical facts such as family names, dates, and genealogical relations, but also to attempt to know the world of my ancestors as a basic foundation of my identity, one I could pass on to my son. While I could access the considerable existing stores of knowledge of Eastern European Jewish life, knowledge of the pre-Holocaust lives of my grandparents and their families only exists in fragments deeply buried within the memories of elderly relatives. It is quite clear to me that I am only at the starting point of what could be a long journey, however, my photographic investigation to date has yielded some useful lessons, chief amongst which are the relations amongst family portraiture, mourning and remembrance, notions of history, memory, and of justice and inheritance. Just as I am the carrier of memories and ancestral post-memories through whom the familial past is brought up into the present for my son to carry into the future, the self-portraits in Familial Ground visually articulate a process of mourning and remembrance, whereby figures from familial and cultural history take on my visage as they emerge into visibility (while at the same time remaining concealed behind my features and behind the opacity of the portrait photograph) to remind us of the unavoidable and necessary work of inheritance. These images are the result of a reconstructive process that acknowledges its own limitations in that the construction of an image of the past unavoidably involves a mixture of fragmented memory, artifice, and invention, and that this mixture necessarily evolves as it is transmitted from generation to generation.
 
Rafael Goldchain