Trauma is time travel

 
Writing is her revenge, and photography is her means of reconstructing her subjective narrative.
 
Sydney Sie was once a visual artist who never revealed her face in interviews. Due to her father's gambling debts, she developed a habit of concealment from a young age. Her most profound olfactory memory of home wasn't her mother's home cooking, but the smell of cardboard boxes used for packing. With a father who vanished without a trace and a mother who seemed absent until she was nine, Sydney's childhood involved constant relocation, intertwined with severe depression, self-destructive tendencies, and physical and sexual violence within her family and relatives.
 

 
With a photographic memory, she looks back at traumatic accounts of home, personally peeling back layers of sealed family history, truthfully documenting her father, mother, and herself. The family is the smallest unit of society. The private history of a family reveals external social frameworks; memories constantly grow, yet history often repeats itself. She meticulously records the significant others and profound injuries in her life, documenting the subtle and unrepeatable colors, smells, and sounds of trauma in countless instances of forced return to violent scenes.
 

 
Dissociation is a psychological defense mechanism where, when a person experiences severe trauma, a significant disconnect can occur between the individual's consciousness, memory, and the real world. Sydney likens the dissociative experiences caused by childhood traumatic events to a time-traveling journey. However, this "superpower" of temporal leaps gained in critical moments seems only to allow one to return to the "past" but not to enter the "future." Thus, writing and creation become her lifeline for climbing over the natural and man-made disasters in her life, seeking how to land in the "present."
 

 
At the end of her first book, Sydney invited female friends who grew up with her to deconstruct the gaze on the female body with a unique visual vocabulary, deliberately creating optical illusions in the images to represent the structural inequality of gender and power, attempting to overturn the patriarchal perspective and masculine way of viewing inherent in photography for many years. In her photo collection, she uses women as the subject to re-retrieve and piece together the complete picture of "time, space, me."
 
About the Book Design
 
Everyone is a shining star. A star gradually collapses into a black hole, collecting all memories, pain, and emotions. However, a black hole is not an end but another form of a star after traversing trauma. The red passport photo embedded on the book cover symbolizes the author's childhood as a ghost population and a non-existent state of survival. The text is arranged in a diary-like essay format, with intentionally varied lengths of blank spaces in different paragraphs, making readers feel as if they are also drawn into the temporal discontinuity of the author's memories.


Book Features

➀ Visual artist Sydney Sie's first reveal of her childhood family diary
➁ A personal history directly confronting severe depression, physical, and sexual violence within the family and relatives
➂ The photography series "Time, Space, Me" with female subjectivity as its core narrative
➃ Self-care notes developed while navigating a high-risk growth environment
➄ Extended viewing index: films and conversations about trauma, memory, and rebirth