Such Is the Silence
There was a room in my grandparents’ house that was called the cold attic. There, dust danced in a dim daylight and the walls and the floors were filled with objects accumulated over time. We used to explore this place with my little sister as the wonderworld of the past. We dug out old exotic treasures and put on our grandma’s old dresses to play. Today, in these abandoned houses that I enter, memories from the past emanate through the peeling layers of walls, bedraggled furniture, the dust on the floor, and the smell. I walk through rooms and I observe. The windows upstairs creak as the wind blows through their frames. A ray of light crosses one of the rooms and downstairs everything remains dark.
Such is the Silence examines physical and psychic relations of house, space and corporeality and it depicts a possible fictional world. The body of work consists of thirteen photographic images, a video piece and found objects. The combination of these three elements create a story-like installation in a gallery space, where each part is in a dialogue with one another, subtly navigating on the borderlines of reality.
In his book Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard studies image’s relation to individuals, space and memory. By examining poetic images, which according to the author, are visual images that arise while reading belles-lettres, Bachelard approaches the notion of space from various viewpoints. He claims that the poetic image is connected to one’s being and personal history and through that it is also related to the places one experiences during lifetime. When reading Poetics of Space, visual memories of my grandparents’ house start to merge with ones from the empty houses where I worked. I’m left to ponder Bachelard's words of one’s soul being a habitat, and how by reminiscing certain houses and rooms we learn to live within ourselves.
In my works I pose for, and with, a camera in abandoned houses in Valencia, Spain. I have spent time in the houses and created images based on how I experienced them, how I felt in them, what I saw and what I imagined. While wandering in the houses I filled them with my own being and imagination which added to the life they were already filled with, the history of previous owners, memories and dreams. When working, I became a character that was born from the dynamics of taking images and the routine of repetition and performing. My works are documents from a fictional world by which I have captured the places, the conceivably lived lives and memories through the imaginary character, Miss Silence, I created.