Subjects and objects

Going back to memory-lane… .

Try to remember the house that you used to live in when you were a child. And if there was more then one house, pick the one that you just thought of first when I asked that question.

Try to remember the house. Where was it? How did it look like? How was it constructed? What was inside it? Where there any particular sounds connected to certain places or objects? … How did the house smell? Try to remember a specific smell.

Now, try to find the place in your house where many stories have been passing through. Maybe you had a secret corner in the kitchen. Or behind a cupboard. Or under a table… . If you want to, you can: draw it, design it again or describe it, write about it.

Gaston Bachelard, a french writer, wrote a book called ‘The poetics of space’. In this book he mentions that our memory related to space is much easier to grasp than our memory related to time. Time slips through our hands easily. We can’t hold it, smell it. It offers us no frame.

Spaces that have been surrounding us are framing a lot of our personal memories. Things, objects are part of the story. That is also why some people -including myself-have difficulties throwing away certain belongings.

At the very beginning, in 1999, I was invited to dive into an intensive research based on childhood memories, Gaston Bachelard’s writings and theatre. In that time I couldn’t predict that this kind of work would affect my whole life. Patrizia Menichelli and Enrique Vargas were some of the first guides on the road. Patricia, would you be able to join the table? That would be wonderful.