The Connector

A woman from North Carolina who has made the whole world her route tells her story through a collage built around a single table, where art and gourmet meet. Aundia left a homeland that had stopped feeling like home, and has spent years moving across the globe. Now in Cyprus, arrived from Qatar, she rests for a while in the island's stillness, until the next destination calls, or until life finds a reason to keep her here.

STORIES FROM CYPRUS

6/15/20262 min read

She is from North Carolina, and the American flag appears in her work, torn at the edge, paired with the words Stars and American. The torn edge matters. Aundia speaks honestly about how her homeland gradually stopped feeling like home, how the political climate there changed something for her, until the country that should have held her no longer did. So she did what some people do when home stops being home. She left to find it elsewhere, everywhere, in pieces, across the world.

For years now she has been a nomad in the truest sense. Not a tourist passing through, but a woman whose life is the movement itself, who carries her sense of belonging with her because she has learned not to leave it in any single place. She arrived in Cyprus from Qatar, one more point on a long and ongoing line. And here, for now, she has found something she values: stillness. The quiet sceneries of the island, the unhurried pace, the particular peace of a small place after the intensity of larger ones.

What makes her story distinct among all the others is that it is not a story of arrival. It is a story of passage, told with grace. She is not trying to put down roots and she does not pretend to be. She is here until her next destination, she says, or until life finds a way to keep her. There is wisdom in holding it that lightly, in letting a place be exactly what it is for as long as it lasts. The connector connects, and then she moves on, carrying the table with her, ready to set it down again wherever she goes next.

And yet she leaves the door open. Until life finds a way to keep her here. Even the most committed traveller, it turns out, allows for the possibility that one of these stillnesses might become a home.

She called it The Connector, and the title is really a self-portrait.

At the heart of her collage sits a table, drawn by her own hand in strokes of gold. On it she has placed the things she gathers as she moves through the world: a work of art, a figure of style and fashion, a bowl of gourmet food being set down by a serving hand. Above it, in bold letters, the words that organise her life. Art. Gourmet. The Connector. This is how Aundia understands herself, as someone who brings things together, who sets a table where cultures and tastes and creative worlds can meet. Wherever she lands, she connects: people to people, food to art, one place to the next.

HERS

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