My Relationship with American Football
2023
Multimedia installation

Photos: Simone Fischer

My Relationship with American Football is an interactive, multi-media installation about mothers, fathers, caretakers, and the ways in which their own identities were formed, were influenced by their fathers, mothers, caretakers. And the ways in which they formed and influenced the identities of their succeeding generation.

It is about rites of passage as attached to heritage, about forces cultural, societal, systemic, institutional, and personal, about the passage of traumas and our points of intersection within these overlapping, interwoven spaces, their interiors and exteriors. Where do they begin and where do they end?

It is about the passage of my own father, my dad. It is as much a memorial to him, a memorial to and for everyone who encounters it, a memorial for loss and grief in all of its forms…as it is a site for joy and expression.

It is my twilight zone, a star trek voyage, a cartoon. It is a game set in the future, hovering in a space that harkens to the past and situates us in the present. It is in a constant state of paradox, just as identity is, just as systems are, just as life is. These paradoxes, these contradictions, are the very reason I made this piece.

The ways we are socialized are such strong forces, it's hard to know who we really are, which is why we hit these identity roadblocks as we grow older. One way that this plays out is that the pressures to be cis-normative and heteronormative are so great, that it is empowering when anyone is able to voice that those embedded cultural norms are just that, embedded cultural norms, perpetuated by tradition, enforced by fundamentalism in its many forms, and that those descriptions of identity do not fit each one of the billions of people who have traversed this earth.

So, with those strong forces in place that have been implicitly and explicitly passed down from generation to generation, how do we really know who we are? What happens to our own identities when we examine these gravities that define us?

Director of Photography: Emma Rose Browne

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Sports Chronicle PDF

ANDREA K HENDRICKSON