“Mother tongue” is about the languages of our identities. The mother tongue being the first language a person learns to speak can be said to be the language a person feels most honest in. This piece discusses the disassociation created between self and culture when a language is cut off from future generations as well as the languages of regret, loss, shame, and emotion.
English (the language that taught me regret, that I think in and feel in), Ibibio-Efik (the language I never had, that I feel the most loss in, that I long in, that I have removed from future generations), French (the language that follows me, that I used to hide my shame), and Spanish (the language that taught me how to feel and that revealed pain to me) are used as a pillars for the passage of my language identities.
The project was created using a combination of self portraits, Photoshop, After effects, and Premiere pro.
The use of moving portraits in this piece are to juxtapose the movement and fluidity of language with the shifts through identities that we take.
