GHC艺廊

Alice Di Certo was born in Italy and graduated from Ca' Foscari University in Venice and lived in Graz, Austria, and Dublin, Ireland before moving to the United States, where she had received an assistantship for the School or Art and Design of Georgia 亚特兰大州立大学. She later decided to stay at GSU, where she got her Master in Art History and worked on a Master of Fine 艺术 in Photography.

She now lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest and is an adjunct faculty at 塔科马 Community College in 塔科马, WA where she also is the studio tech for photography 和雕塑. She has shown her work (both photographic and sculptural) in 塔科马 as well as in the South East of the US in group and solo shows.

With her work, she explores the dynamics and connections between people. 她的目标 is to provoke reflection in her audience, offering new perspectives on life and human 交互. As a first generation immigrant, with her series “首页 away from 首页 - Immigrants, Refugees, and Undocumented Citizens,” she wanted to give visibility to the diverse population of individuals living in 塔科马 and surrounding areas who 出生在另一个国家.

New Immigrants, Refugees, and Undocumented Citizens (I am borrowing this term from 何塞·安东尼奥·瓦尔加的亲爱的 美国，一个无证公民的笔记) continue to join the United States today, as they have done since the 17th century, and discussions about differences and integrations is a recurring topic which happens 靠近我的心. As a first-generation immigrant myself, after creating a series about first generation Italian immigrants, I wanted to give visibility, through my photography, to the diverse population of individuals living in 塔科马 and surrounding 出生在另一个国家的人.

I photographed people from 5 continents, I asked them about their life before and after coming to the US and a few things about themselves, like the languages they speak, if they have family members from their country of 起源 living in the US, if they have been treated differently because of their 起源s. 这个信息是 meant to bring light on the similarities and differences between immigrants from different 国家.

I also asked them to bring to the photo-shoot, objects and food which are important to them, and represent both who they are and their relationship to their country of 起源. The images are meant to be displayed with the text from the interviews and audio recordings in both English and one of the languages they each speak (often is 不止一个). Often the subjects are between light and dark, to symbolize their being “here and there” with connection to their 国家 of 起源 as well as the US.

So far, this project has been wonderful and in some cases heartbreaking, as many encounter 歧视. It also made me realize how similar some of our experiences are, no matter where we come from and how we got here, but also how different they can be, due to blatant racism, anti-Black, anti-Asian, or anti-Hispanic attitudes. 这很容易 to forget that moving to a new country, leaving one’s birth land and abandoning one’s culture and language, leaves an invisible mark, an unseen scar. 塔科马港市非 born might come from 国家 ravaged by war, extreme poverty, autocratic regimes, and chronic unemployment, or from rich and peaceful 国家. 然而，澳门威尼斯人在线赌场仍然分享 some of the same feeling of longing, of yearning for what we left behind.

One common struggle for us, non-native born, is language, the accent we carry, which, for those of us who moved here as adults, we will never fully lose. 在美丽的 作家诺维奥莱特·布拉瓦约在她的小说中所说的话 澳门威尼斯人在线赌场需要新的名字: “We could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men.”

Being a non-native born, makes us both an outsider and insider in two (or more) lands and cultures, and despite the differences between people from different places, there 澳门威尼斯人在线赌场之间有深刻的相似之处吗. 澳门威尼斯人在线赌场是生活在分裂之中的人 前后，这里和那里. 现在有很多关于这些的讨论 who come from elsewhere, about their reasons for being here, in the US, about our worth, cost, “weight” on society, contribution, about our very right to be here. 什么 I want to explore, instead, with this series, is our humanity and our history. 塔科马 is us too, and I want to share with my T-town who we are.

I would like to thank TCC 吉格港校园, for the space to exhibit this series. But especially I am incredibly grateful to the people in these photos, who are the soul and heart of this project: I truly appreciate their time, their labor, their 信任，和他们的勇气. I learned so much from them all, from their journeys and their families, and I hope visitors to this exhibit will too.