Catharsis

In 2017 Rodney "Ferris Bueller" Bailey documented the contents of his old room in his parents' house in Queens, NY-full of ephemera collected while growing up in the late eighties and nineties, and largely untouched since. The result of this cathartic process of sorting and recording is this book: part visual autobiography, part time capsule. "My bedroom ... was my sanctuary because it contained all the things that defined me," recalls Bueller, and his mementos include magazines, posters, photos, collages, T-shirts, concert tickets, a Walkman. His extensive collection of sneakers dominates the book, triggers vivid personal memories (expressed in texts throughout the image sequence), and makes palpable a past where the X-Files, Nirvana and Anna Nicole Smith were still current news. Catharsis is both a chronicle of Bueller's sometimes difficult youth and a "record of life before the Internet or social media, before everyone knew what everyone else was doing all the time. [...] The only things that would connect you were clothes, sneakers and music."