andreo otiniano
PORTRAITS
quarantine
During the year 2020, we all have undergone an abstract change of dissociation and ostracization. We feared stepping foot in front of friends and, family. Seeing empty streets and missing souls, hiding inside the confines of their home, the only escape was to take a casual walk around town. I had come home from my final year of college, lost, scared, and in dire need of structure. Not one of us had an answer as to when the future would resume any sort of peaceful normalcy. Each graduating class of 2020 had undergone a deep level of anxiety, wondering where to take our next steps in the professional field. I was not yet ready to accept defeat, knowing that I had zero control over what the next day had in store for me, yet I was only aware of the uncertain truth of what the world had come to. I left my house multiple times a week to walk and re-explore my hometown, learning to accept the beauty in the underlooked mundane. Before the pandemic, we have taken our every day for granted. Seeing empty cars, soulless sidewalks, and echoing streets, we were/ are living in a “beautiful” dystopia of lost bodies. I viewed our world as what it was born to be, a simple, existing being of light, man-made material, all abandoned. As I was learning to rediscover the new societal way of behaving, I was learning to accept defeat and let time take its course. We have zero control over what the future has in store for us, and once we accept the harsh truth, our road to happiness becomes much smoother.
“did you eat today?”
C. 2016-2021
For the majority of my life, I’ve only experienced a home that was broken. A boy living with no father and a struggling mother raising two children on her own, I was lost. Starting in elementary school, I would come home to food cooked for me by my grandma that lived right next door to me. She would take care of me while my mother was working her second job. My grandmother, Angela Dattilo, was born in the south of Italy in 1937 and began cooking for her siblings and family when she was six years old. She would walk, miles away to her relative’s farm, shoeless, to ask for ingredients. As my grandmother grows older, I try to record the recipes that she makes for our family. She and the food she cooked for me is the childhood I want to remember. I grew depressed, seeing my parents fight and going through the motions of hating school and then coming home to a bowl of pasta, enough to serve two hungry adults. I finished every last bite, not realizing I wasn’t hungry but just eating my feelings. It wasn’t long until I gained weight, enough to be very apparent and my visits with my father became less frequent as I couldn’t handle the emotional and verbal abuse any longer. I ended my relationship with him in 2011. Even after erasing him from the family photo, his presence and words stuck with me and negatively affected me for years. I had become a person he would never recognize. As I strive to heal with the help of my mother, brother, and the rest of my family, I learn to appreciate food again, and what it means to be a family.