Until all of this is over

2020 – 2021

The pandemic has now brought the “new normal” to the world. For the project “The grass is greener on the other side”, a scheduled daily performance took place in my garden to announce my existence, addressing only my followers on the internet, who longingly awaited my next ensemble.

Confinement creeps back after the first lockdown, which led mankind with uncertainty, immobility, fear and grief. Photography works as a mirror to one’s thoughts and feelings, but at the same time brings into focus the mass trauma, which transcends reality.

The “anthropause” (a neologism coined at the start of the pandemic), enabled self-representation as a form of self-reflection at a time of confinement. Photography plays a decisive role as self-portraiture, on the one hand, evidences and proves the unacquainted zeitgeist and, on the other, it underscores mere existence at a time when loss rules all.

These eight collages were created in the winter of 2000-2021, as an effort to visually converse with my family’s photo archive, always using the background of self-discovery during the first lockdown. Childhood friends and carefree images from my childhood, converse with adulthood, trauma, loss, memories. The adult self sometimes simply stands by, observing; and other times participates in this new ritual. Parent figures can be traced behind my grandfather’s leter, in which he gives his permission for their engagement, whilst I, the daughter, dressed in the mother’s clothes, symbolically bring forward the weights of the past, holding a rock from a petrified forest. Images of a young and beautiful mother, ease the weight of waiting for normality to return.

The collages don’t strictly follow the order they were shot in during the first lockdown. The editing of deceased family members into the canvas with my own adult self-portrait is undoubtedly a difficult venture, which requires time, thought and the management of complex emotions. “Until all of this is over” (a phrase used to veil the true substance of the term ‘pandemic’), the family photo archive offers new visual material for thought and realization.