‘Far From Home’ will grapple with childhood memories and conflicting homes at Flux Art Space next month

How do you grapple with the idea of home, and the sporadic, wondrous, sometimes painful childhood memories that have shaped you?

Amanda Maciel Antunes is exploring the conflicting feelings of what home means and “the memories that we carry with us” in her newest exhibit at Flux Art Space in Long Beach next month. She has spent the last year and a half painstakingly perusing through old family memories and reimagining, reconsidering and healing while she cuts and stitches photographs back together. 

“Either the memories that we carry with us are hash memories, or sometimes they are made-up memories. Sometimes they’re recreated in order for you to survive,” Antunes said. “For me, this whole project is about rescuing spaces in my home, in the past that I would like to remember, but at the same time converging and accepting that there are things about that home that I would like to forget.”

Her exhibit “Far From Home” will grace the walls at Flux with over 200 photographs of memories from throughout her life, either taken by herself or from her family’s archive. Over a large, checkered crafting board, she began cutting people and places from photographs and merging them with others, using a needle and red thread to join different times and places together. 

The surrealist images will take viewers through her wandering journey from the countryside of Brazil to bustling cities in America; from loneliness and yearning to freedom, motherhood and eventually peace. 

“‘Far From Home’ is the idea of creating a home within two homes, and what does that look like if they merge or if they collapse,” Antunes said. “[…] It’s also the unification of two pieces together. I wanted to make it visible so the only way for me to do that felt like a thread and the needle to go through it.”

The title for her exhibit, “Far From Home” was influenced by Iman Mersal’s poem “The Idea of Houses,” specifically the lines: “Let home be that place where you / never notice the bad lighting, let it be a wall whose cracks / keep growing until one day you take them for doors.”

Much like her past projects, “Far From Home” will also feature sound and performance elements, as well as community engagement. Antunes invited Long Beach residents of all backgrounds and ages to submit their own photographs that embody the idea of home for them and will include them in the exhibit alongside her own photos. 

Though the project was “deeply personal,” Antunes said that every time she would share her work with someone, they had their own similar stories and experiences. 

Antunes has had a peculiar, yet relatable, journey in finding her place in the world. She grew up in a small town in Brazil, where generations of her family lived within walking distance of one another. Her mother’s side of the family was part of a religious cult, Antunes said, which made for a “restrictive” upbringing.

Despite being surrounded by family, Antunes said she often felt imprisoned by expectations to be someone she didn’t feel was authentically her.

“Leaving Brazil was a liberation, and I really didn’t know myself when I left and moving to this country was my first act of freedom,” she said.

Antunes is the first person in her family to pursue an artistic career, though she considers everyone in her family “makers,” who hand-sewed clothing and crafted doll houses from cardboard boxes. She considers her grandfather her first mentor, who died while she was still in Brazil and was a great influence on her leaving. 

Antunes began her “Far From Home” project while pregnant with her first child, who is now nine months old. She described the process of cutting up and stitching together photos as “healing,” although she was filled with a rush of nostalgia. 

“When you become a mother, all of your childhood memories come back,” Antunes said. “All of your past, like how you were raised, questions you never asked yourself like, ‘How the fuck am I supposed to do this?’ And I wanted my mother, but I also didn’t. It was confusing.”

Antunes has had her art—and accompanying performance—shown in cities across Southern California. She was introduced to Betsy Lohrer Hall, the director and curator for Flux Art Space through social media and followed her work for months before building up the courage to ask if she would be interested in collaborating. 

“She’s been on the track that I’ve admired, showing the kind of work that I like to see in a lot of ways, often communities of women or non-binary artists … So I’ve been a fan of hers for years,” Antunes said about Hall. 

Hall became enthralled with the way Antunes would mix different art forms—sound, performance, writing, photography, sewing—sometimes in unusual places to create a fully immersive experience for viewers. They collaborated on a number of projects and performance pieces before Hall invited Antunes to host an exhibit at Flux. 

“I am a believer in fostering that kind of engagement and exchange so that the viewer isn’t just passively viewing what someone else said, [but] that they feel a sense of connection, either through the content of the artwork, or the material of the artwork or having actually contributed something to the project.”

“Far From Home” will open to the public on March 4 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. with a live performance from Antunes. The exhibit will run through April 8 and residents can attend an open conversation about the project on March 18 at 1 p.m.

Flux Art Space is located at 410 Termino Ave. and open to the public on Saturdays from noon to 5 p.m. or by appointment on Fridays and Sundays.