Hereafter

Hereafter is based on the story of the photographer’s grandparents. For over thirty years, John and Mary Phillips worked in Sudan, Libya, Oman, Jordan and Cyprus. They witnessed the gradual decline of the British Empire, in which they had lived since childhood and which shaped their worldview. Federico Clavarino collected letters, photographs, documents and memorabilia that he then used as a guide for his own photographic work in Oman, Jordan, Sudan and England. Hereafter addresses the creation of collective memory by reorganising the found material, together with Clavarino’s photographs and snippets of conversations, in a way that mimics the selective, unconscious and combinatorial process of remembering. It is an attempt to deconstruct the narrative of the family, imbued with colonial discourse, by enclosing past images in a dialectical relationship with contemporary images, thus showing how the Empire still lives as a ghostly presence or an inherited symptom.