In the late 1980s I lived in Southside Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at a time when more than 2,000 people a year were being murdered in New York City. The neighbourhood was intense, unstable and full of contradictions — violent and dangerous, but also creatively alive.

In 2012 I returned with a camera, trying to reconnect with the atmosphere of that time and place. The resulting video documents both the impossibility and persistence of memory: the attempt to recover fragments of the past from a city that has transformed almost beyond recognition.

The video also shows me in the studio working on drawings connected to blood/MarcyAV, a collaborative project with sound artist Lynne Thermann and poet Sheila Black.

Together we explored nostalgia, youth, urban violence and the emotional residue carried by places and objects. The project combined drawing, painting, moving image, sound and text to reflect on the city as both a lived reality and a remembered space.

As Lynne Thermann wrote:

“The show presents what survives from a shared city of dreams, which now exists only in artifacts of terror and love.”

More than a decade later, these questions about memory, displacement and the stories attached to places continue to shape my work.