PHL / Other Home

Oct 25 - Dec 6, 2025 

Other Home is a dual exhibition of animated video installations created by Amy Lee Ketchum and Ana Carolina Estarita-Guerrero exploring the complex and often fractured connection between the individual and their perceptions of home in the context of diaspora.

Amy Lee Ketchum is a second generation Chinese-American based in Philadelphia. Her works in this show relate to an animation in progress, Lanterns. The artist parses her sense of alienation from her family’s home country by building a world of fantastic creatures drawn from Chinese folklore colliding with humans and capitalism. Central to the show, is the story of the sacred sun crows who wreaked havoc when they broke with their cyclical routine of illuminating the earth in turns, and were consequently shot down save for one. The artist draws a comparison to the “invasive” lanternfly and the tree of heaven, who were both brought to the US aboard cargo ships. The inability to control them has led to campaigns to eliminate them. The artist sees the rhetoric about “invasive species” echoed in attitudes towards immigrants and questions what it means to be “naturalized”. History sweeps one away from one’s roots. Languages are lost. New seeds are planted. In the process of making this work, the artist forges her own relationship to an ancestral land which is now as foreign to her as she is to it.

Ana Carolina Estarita-Guerrero is a Colombian immigrant to the United States. Her work explores the conundrums of finding home in a new cultural landscape at the expense of an increasing sense of alienation from her homeland. The works in the show are all a play on the idea that “El campesino no ve el paisaje” (The field worker does not see the landscape). To see a culture, one must be extracted from it.

Using proximity as their conceptual anchor, the works create impossible choices between belonging and observing: Houses that disappear when one gets close to inspect them, a door that stands as an invitation but lacks a handle (its only solid component a peephole where fragments of domestic life play out in a house we cannot enter), a house made of mirrors that reveals more when we let go of our reflection. These spatial paradoxes mirror Estarita-Guerrero’s experience of perpetual displacement, where every gesture of approach becomes, at the same time, an act of distancing.

Through their distinct but parallel explorations of diaspora, both Amy Lee Ketchum and Ana Carolina Estarita-Guerrero reveal home as a space that must be continually reimagined. The works in this exhibition illuminate how displacement transforms the self, moving those who emigrate to create new forms of belonging that exist neither fully in the past nor entirely in the present.

Part of Ana Carolina Estarita-Guerrero’s project was made possible with the support of ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Educators Forum. Amy Lee Ketchum is grateful to the Independent Public Media Fund for supporting the development of Lanterns.