Yucca St

Yucca Street is a short video filmed in an old apartment I used to live in. The place has long been emptied, but I still find myself walking past it and looking up at the windows. Some of them used to belong to my daily routine, especially during shifts of natural light.

The video consists entirely of static shots. No human figure appears. The visuals are composed of blinds, shadows, reflected light, and textured walls. These are things I had seen countless times, yet certain light at a certain hour still insists on being remembered. Light itself is common, but emotion keeps assigning significance to it. I knew I should have stopped looking back, but I kept doing it anyway.

The sound structure is more performative. I wrapped my phone in a plastic bag and submerged it in a tank of water to record myself playing Pavane pour une infante défunte by Maurice Ravel. The performance is hesitant and slow. I was not aiming for fluency; I wanted the hesitation to remain. Beneath the surface of water, the melody becomes soft, broken, and damp. It drags. This dragging becomes the actual pace of the work, moving through sound, mood, gaze, and narrative. Along with the submerged piano, the soundscape includes ambient wind, water, and a short clip of human voice accidentally recorded when I revisited the space. Together, they form a wet sonic surface that cannot be dried.

The piece is less about memory as content than memory as residue. I am interested in how emotional presence remains in space through displacement, deflection, and delay: light bouncing off a wall, sound softening into echo, a moment extending past its time. Yucca Street is a small study on how time gets stuck inside perception, and how certain spaces begin to decay emotionally even before they vanish physically.