This photographic project with intimate character and poetic language is just trying to tell a story, a personal and unic story. The story of my house and, nevertheless, the story of all the houses, personals and uniques, of each of us. Because this project talks about time and memory, it talks about the human being and his fingerprints, but without paying attention to megabuildings or millenary ruins of already extinct big civilizations. No, this story is much more intimate.
A house is stops being a house the moment it is filled with life; it turns into a home. A place that each tenant intends to alter the space and make it his own. He makes his shelter out of these four empty walls and the odd furniture. And starts decorating this empty space with little pieces of himself; things that carry his signature of life.
Little by little, these “things” earn their own presence and they become
fundamental elements of this domestic landscape… Sometimes they are repositioned; sometimes they get forgotten in a corner. Nevertheless, they all become something familiar that stays at your home and become a part of your life; sometimes they even stay after your departure, to become a part of the next ones’ life like an unrequested inheritance. Like a fingerprint you leave in this house; “I was here…”
Those who ever lived in a shared flat will definitely acknowledge that feeling of living with an unrequested heritage. If you are not the first tenant of that house, it is quite easy ending up living with those souvenirs that, some day, somebody you don’t know at all, left in the shelves of your, current living room. The awkward thing is that, as a good probability, those souvenirs will live with you until the end of your stay. They will live even with the heritage you will have left to the next tenant. In a way that, after some years, that home is plenty of memories of other lives. Elements disposed around with a random taste without any pattern. Elements that fill the emptiness with no criteria. Things that nobody will ever throw away, because they remind you that person who once arrived as a total stranger and left your home as a part time family member.
Those heritages are part of home. They are the evidence that it is not just a house anymore.
This photographic project with intimate character and poetic language is just trying to tell a story, a personal and unic story. The story of my house and, nevertheless, the story of all the houses, personals and uniques, of each of us. Because this project talks about time and memory, it...
This photographic project with intimate character and poetic language is just trying to tell a story, a personal and unic story. The story of my house and, nevertheless, the story of all the houses, personals and uniques, of each of us. Because this project talks about time and memory, it talks about the human being and his fingerprints, but without paying attention to megabuildings or millenary ruins of already extinct big civilizations. No, this story is much more intimate.
A house is stops being a house the moment it is filled with life; it turns into a home. A place that each tenant intends to alter the space and make it his own. He makes his shelter out of these four empty walls and the odd furniture. And starts decorating this empty space with little pieces of himself; things that carry his signature of life.
Little by little, these “things” earn their own presence and they become
fundamental elements of this domestic landscape… Sometimes they are repositioned; sometimes they get forgotten in a corner. Nevertheless, they all become something familiar that stays at your home and become a part of your life; sometimes they even stay after your departure, to become a part of the next ones’ life like an unrequested inheritance. Like a fingerprint you leave in this house; “I was here…”
Those who ever lived in a shared flat will definitely acknowledge that feeling of living with an unrequested heritage. If you are not the first tenant of that house, it is quite easy ending up living with those souvenirs that, some day, somebody you don’t know at all, left in the shelves of your, current living room. The awkward thing is that, as a good probability, those souvenirs will live with you until the end of your stay. They will live even with the heritage you will have left to the next tenant. In a way that, after some years, that home is plenty of memories of other lives. Elements disposed around with a random taste without any pattern. Elements that fill the emptiness with no criteria. Things that nobody will ever throw away, because they remind you that person who once arrived as a total stranger and left your home as a part time family member.
Those heritages are part of home. They are the evidence that it is not just a house anymore.
Oleo sobre luz
Social, documentary and artistic photography by the Spanish artist Sergio Martinez
