Olla ei mistään kotoisinOf No Origin

“Olla ei mistään kotoisin” literally means “to originate from nowhere” in Finnish, but the expression can also imply being of low quality or having no worth. What does it mean to come from nowhere, or from too many places with no single home to claim? Who decides whose lives and histories are worth archiving?

The ongoing artistic research project Of No Origin (不知所起, OEMK) grows from a mystifying bricolage of personal family history — bits of stories here, a photograph there, and the silence that surrounds them.

For most of my life, my great-grandmother’s past was a mystery to me. She died when I was ten and rarely spoke about her life. I began looking for her through records left by other people. In the online archive of Whampoa Military Academy, I found a pixelated photograph of her husband. Through a memoir, I found traces of her father.

The project began with questions around belonging and archiving, and has gradually expanded beyond my own family history. When no direct image survives, I work with found archival photographs as proxies for what is missing.

Of No Origin explores absence and illegibility as potential portals to alternative forms of knowledge. It is concerned with forms of memory and history that exist outside established archives: what is remembered, what is forgotten, what remains undocumented, and what survives in indirect, fragmented, or illegible forms.