Daughter of Unconscious Fate
Faye Schwarz
Why do certain behaviors and emotional tendencies repeat across generations? Research in neuroscience and epigenetics suggests that experiences such as silence, displacement, and trauma tend to circulate within families, shaping future generations below the threshold of conscious recognition.
Daughter of Unconscious Fate draws on a personal archive of family photographs, letters, and images taken with inherited cameras to examine how material and psychological traces move across generations. Photographic materials function simultaneously as subject and medium. Through color intervention, recomposition, and collage, the fixed authority of the image is interrupted, inviting consideration of inherited patterns as something that can be questioned and reworked.
These materials culminate in an experimental short film in which assemblage, repetition, and sequencing reflect the persistence of passed-down patterns while inviting viewers to consider the unseen forces shaping their experiences. Narrated reflections intermix with recorded family conversations, while sound bath audio introduces a temporal rhythm.
Alongside the film, a book extends the project into print, gathering collaged images, the film's spoken text, research, and critical commentary, leaving the viewer with the question: Do we perpetuate the unconscious cycle, or interrupt the pattern?