Originally produced as part of a site-specific installation: It wasn't the fire created for a storage locker as part of Holding Patterns, group exhibition curated by Art Spin in 2018.
This video was installed on a flatscreen monitor in a plastic pillow bag (see photo) amidst other objects from my late grandfather's house. Here is the text accompanying the installation project, from Autumn 2018:
"My grandfather died this Spring. Despite the fact that he left us nothing, we spent hours cleaning out his ‘estate’ - this installation is comprised of a selection of his things.
They bought the house in 1967 in what they now call 'East Chinatown'; he barely left it towards the end.
I always thought he'd go by burning the house down: he'd fall asleep with a lit cigarette and the TV blaring. When he first immigrated and was living in Sudbury, his neighbour--a widow with three children--snapped one day and lit their shared house on fire; he lost the few things he had.
His story is not unlike others; like others, leaves a light mark. In Ban en Banlieue (2015) Bhanu Kapil writes:
'As the text of a present moves so rapidly it cannot be written. This is why immigrants don't write many novels, only emigrants do. I write to you at night, for example, when even my body is hidden from view.’"

Available as a single channel projection and an installation.