Amber Eve Anderson

Homestead is an interdisciplinary project that situates my matrilineage alongside larger notions of landscape, home, and gender. In 1873, ten miles south of my native Nebraska and an hour's drive from the geographic center of the United States, my great-great-great grandparents claimed land under the Homestead and Timber Culture Acts. The landscape is now vast, indistinguishable farmland. History reveals more absences than answers. Two 150-year-old trees at the site and a nearby pioneer cemetery where my maternal grandmother, her mother, and her mother's mother are all buried, are vague markers of this history. In my return to this land, my matrilineage is subsumed by Mother Nature. The work archives and memorializes what remains of this place­­­­—personally significant and universally forgotten—while considering the ways certain histories are privileged over others.

This work questions Google’s data storage methods in the form of a recorded online performance.

My older brother and my younger sister recount overlapping memories of our childhood home to me over FaceTime.