Abstracted Routes: Flights of Reunion

The emotions of traveling to stay connected with loved ones around the world are both thrilling and bittersweet. Yet beyond the excitement, the logistics—reduced to flight paths and numbers—can be exhausting for someone living abroad. In a part-performance piece, I carried a red leather suitcase through all my travels, from London to Vancouver, then Vancouver to Tokyo, and back to London. The weight of the suitcase mirrored the burden of those journeys in the year after COVID, as I reconnected with family I hadn’t seen in four years. The repeated flight patterns traced and overlapped, blurring into something abstract and bird-like, capturing the fleeting and disorienting nature of constant travel.