Effects
Milla Dytham
https://www.instagram.com/milla.dytham
https://milladytham.squarespace.com/ (password: passtosite)
/ɪˈfɛkt/
Noun
Plural noun: Effects
1. A change which is a result or consequence of an action or other cause.
2. The lighting, sound, or scenery used in a play, film, or broadcast.
3. Personal belongings.
This project examines inheritance as a living, layered force. One that moves through bloodlines, memory, and matter simultaneously. What we receive from those who came before us is rarely singular: a father's silence, a coping mechanism, a family home filled with objects you cannot bring yourself to throw away. These transmissions - genetic, psychological, and material - do not arrive separately but are folded into one another. They are inseparable in the way that heirlooms carry grief, and bodies carry genetics and history. Through an account of my own experience with what has been left to me, this work questions whether the past can ever truly precede us, or whether we are bound to how it continues to inhabit us.
Before this project, I had only had a relationship with my immediate family. And for the first time in my life, I began growing a relationship to my aunt. This project follows the development of our kinship, as well as an aquirment of knowledge about myself that had previously been out of reach. She has spent years accumulating the material remnants of our family's history, objects spanning more than a century, and together we sifted through them. In the stories she told of love, betrayal, pain, and survival, I began to understand not only where I came from, but why I am the way that I am. What struck me most was the serendipity she named between us: as we arrived at the same patterns of thought, relationship, and self, whilst never being around eachother in the past. The cycle did not need proximity to repeat itself.
The work takes two forms. A documentary piece draws on my aunt's testimony of her life and the words she shared for me. Alongside this, a large photographic print of the exterior of the house anchors the work as a metaphor for inheritance and investment. Scattered before it is a stack of roughly four hundred unique archival prints, each one an image from my aunt's collection of family photographs and objects. Audience members are invited to take one. In doing so, they participate in the work's central proposition: that inheritance is something that arrives in your hands without your asking, something that can be received as gift or as burden. And that the question of what to do with it remains your own.