Prince’s death made me change my life and move to his hometown | Prince

I clearly remember the first time I heard it Prince. I was a dreamer, an artist growing up in the 80s in rural Australia, I felt out of place. One day, I turned on the cassette player in my room, and heard something very different from the rock music I grew up with – something electronic and alive. He was a prince. My body moved. Since then, he became my secret life friend, his music with a great mix of sexuality and spirituality that I did not have the language for. Songs like Controversy and Purple Rain became a license to get better, and myself.

My love for Prince continued as I grew up. I moved to New York to pursue an art career, but I didn’t make it, and I became an art director. I supported other artists, programmers, lived with art and not within it.

All my life I wanted to see Prince live, but I always doubted it. I came close, splurging on tickets to a show at Madison Square Garden, but I didn’t go. After his religious conversion in 2001, I think I was afraid to see him change, shrinking from the happy vision of freedom I had in my mind. It’s the sadness that created everything that followed.

When he died in 2016, I was in the subway station. I read the news on my phone and stumbled backwards, catching myself against the tiled wall. The pity was great and immediate. I went home and cried for days, eating everything Prince-related I could get my hands on. I wandered around the city looking for a purple cloak, and finally found a purple cloak that became my weapon of war. I was getting dressed straight from the store on the subway, which felt so casual and appropriate. Within a week, movie theaters across the city were showing Purple Rain. For about a month, I went to check up every few days after work. Sometimes it’s packed, sometimes it’s me and Prince in the room.

Within weeks of his death, the idea of ​​visiting MinneapolisPrince’s house started to catch. It didn’t make sense – Prince was gone, what would I find there? – but I couldn’t shake it. So I booked a ticket. As soon as I got into the airport taxi, people started telling me their stories about Prince. I visited his place, Paisley Park for the first time, where visitors gathered on the fence, leaving offerings – flowers, letters, drawings – to communicate freely with each other. The whole city began to feel the excitement of the love and the shared experience.

I went back to New York, but I couldn’t settle down. I returned to Minneapolis again and again. Within a few months, I decided to move. Unlike the rest of my life, where I would have been an observer and not an artist, I thought: “Why don’t I just listen to this singing, and see where this amazing journey is going?” Finally, about a year after Prince’s death I quit my job, and left my life in New York. I didn’t have a clear plan. I was in the middle of a PhD, researching the work of artists in society, and I changed my mind to Prince and his legacy. In this way, Minneapolis became my head and my home.

I started to collect stories, and see how people make their records, their memories. It was The People’s Museum for Prince, a museum I founded, which shows Prince’s evolution through the memories of those whose lives he touched.

At the same time, my friends put me in touch with a man who needed a housekeeper in his Minneapolis while he was traveling for the summer. The moment we met, we fell in love. I moved into his house while he was away. When he came back, I didn’t move. It was intense and overwhelming, and the rush of emotions mirrored everything else in my life. For a while, it felt like Minneapolis gave me everything at once.

Then the relationship ended, in a dangerous and destructive way. After this, I left the city, and then returned to Australia during the epidemic. But Minneapolis still felt like a second home. Now, at the age of 55, I live between Australia and Minneapolis, continue the museum, and make films – including short documentaries, Beloved Belovedabout my journey to connect with Prince – to finish the work that started there.

I came to Minneapolis looking for Prince, following his whereabouts, and researching his life. Instead, what I found was a sense of community and, more importantly, a rediscovery of my artistic self. I went looking for Prince and found my way back to my life, and the artist I always dreamed of being.

Beloved is are shown at festivals. Video produced by short is in development.