I born and lived my first 3 years of life in the house of my paternal grandparents with my parents. After that, we moved.
Every year we returned routinely and almost ritually; we spent summers, vacations, parties, birthdays and funerals. In each trip my memory was re-updated, those places that I knew so well and that I explored through the game could be the scene of a new adventure. As it grew, these places changed, filled with new objects, books became more important; new people appeared and the relational dynamics were carried out in these landscapes. It was beginning to create a dynamic relationship between my memory and the place. Through our identity, we form a bridge between the places we join and are at the same time the anchor of our memories.
After the death of my two grandparents, I decided to go back, photograph and feel this house again. When I arrived, my memories were contrasted with what I experience; my memories allude to past times but full of life, a place crowded with people, many times around the table, with objects scattered throughout the rooms. This return was not equal to the previous ones; although I embraced the familiarity of the environment, it was strange in my feeling.
I return and there are ruins, there are still the objects that I remember from my childhood, but these seem out of place, accumulating dust and sediment. The scene despite being uninhabited marks a presence, a trace, there is something familiar in these, these allude to a past time. The most paradoxical thing is that when I get involved in the intimacy of the home, as I get closer, the distance and absence of loved ones and their presence becomes more evident.
In these ruins rest the belongings of those who left us. These objects are perhaps the door to the kingdom of the past, they are a way to contact us intimately with those we remember, even involuntarily.
The accumulation of objects no longer makes sense, is no longer collected but accumulates, as an attempt to revive the past, ends up burying what is below. Looking for the beauty of what was once, you can not even appreciate the stillness or the passage of time, but the sadness of despair and abandonment.
Our homes or dwellings represent a space where the internal is fused with the external, where we can be ourselves. Our houses are the closest geography to privacy. In this outer space we build something of ourselves. Our house as an extension ourselves.
The landscape constitutes a spatiality and a temporality, it connects us, it touches us, it punctures us, in the psychic and the somatic. Therefore, the visit to a dwelling also in a certain sense is the visit of the loved one, of the inhabitant or of the one who did it. Through the spaces, of the objects, a kind of symbolic reconstitution can be achieved, they reach a mnemonic value.
We keep the memories captive, that return to a specific place and time, the past returns to us in the present. On the one hand, we join the places where events occur and in turn, memories are affirmed in us. The past touches us, returning in the form of memories, alludes to our identity in a particular moment and space. Temporality and materiality are linked. Thus, memory ceases to be merely a temporal phenomenon but also material.
The entrance and exit of this house is a threshold and a limit. The limit between before and after, a rite of development of a stage. When entering this house again, not only the physical entrance is marked, but also the return of memory. It's a before and after, there's no way to go back.
When leaving this house I am no longer the same, I have been able to see and relive past times and somehow feel the loss, live it. This is not a closure, but on the contrary, an opening to the path of emotions, a fuller awareness of what has been lived and what will no longer return. It has been at least 3 years since that visit, I think it still haunts me, even when preparing these writings.
The same memory perpetuates the bonds, the forgetfulness would be the second loss, in the memories the hope of finding what is lost is maintained.
