Old age, time, space, memory
On my 23rd birthday I found myself sitting in silence with my 90 year old nana. She was sitting in a chair opposite me, with one leg resting on a coffee table. On this coffee table, between where we were sitting, was the ravaged remains of a passionfruit sponge cake and empty cups of tea. We had just finished discussing my plans to travel to Europe early next year. I watched her as she began to inspect a wound on her leg with an inscrutable expression. The injury was the result of a fall the following week. I continued to sit there and observe her body language, her thinking, her gestures, the silence. As the silence between us grew deeper, the whistled sound of a plane became increasingly loud as it flew past overhead.
Returning to spaces from our past in our 'night dreams'
An old man wearing a dark tweed suit stops on an oak tree lined street to look at a new house being built across the road. This new house is in a faux French provincial style. As he stands there, propped up by his walking stick, workers come in and out of the site lugging hard waste and throw it into an iron skip. No one notices him standing there. The man, a retired architect, has an expression on his face that bears the weight of his sadness and confusion. This particular site was where one of his first designs was constructed: an early modernist dwelling that was cantilevered over a hill and hugged a cluster of gum trees. Now, the trees have long gone and the site has been flattened and evened out. The loud intermittent bangs of waste being thrown into the skip powerfully complements the image of the man standing there. Because the site is so different to what he remembers, and also because of his increasing dementia, all he sees is a blurry image of something he once knew. The camera stays with the man for a drawn out amount of time. It dwells on his expression and presence. It witnesses his behaviour, his solitude, his time. He leans against a fence and looks on. The sound of deep rigging reverberates around him as he dreams.
When I saw this man on the street, I thought instantly of Tacita Dean's 16mm film, Boots (2003). Dean captures an old man, ostensibly an architect, walking unsteadily from room to room within an empty old mansion: the Casa de Serralves in Porto, designed during the art deco era by architect José Marques da Silva. I've only seen 'Boots' as still images in a book, but it gave me such a strong sense of architecture being a vessel that retains one's memories, desires. The film's subject is a spectre of the house's former life, of memory, and so on. Through dwelling on the lonely presence of the architect, Dean accentuates a feeling of desperate loss. Gaston Bachelard wrote in his The Poetics of Space: 'all the spaces of our past moments of solitude remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative. We return to them in our night dreams.'
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Stills from Boots found in a book on Tacita Dean's work |