LETTERS FOR TWO, AND NO-ONE ELSE
(2014) INSTALLATION (PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO, ARTIST BOOK)
A take on the inevitable burden of patriarchal legacy and an attempt to escape it by concealing the borrowed personality in the fictitious memory.
I'm a product of what others have invested in me. The apriority of parents, the automation of high school, being in love with university lecturers. In my parents are their parents, in turn, their love and their blindness. And so on, into the depths – it's all the same. Every artefact from my ancestral tribe built me up. Each led to the unavoidability of my appearance. Every line of the letters of her lover to my mother crystallised her understanding of my future father. Proof by contradiction. All of it came together at one point – in me. I was deprived of the subjunctive. Parents are an authority that can only be shaken with a lot of effort. They shine through in phrases and gestures. If you want to offend someone close to you, compare them with their parents. The goal is dissimilarity. You don't want to be reflected in their eyes.
Conclusive liberation comes when they pass on. Then you gain the vision that was taken at birth. These texts are letters to my mother. From different years, roughly from the 1960s to the 1980s. From friends, parents, and lovers. The archive was left to me when she died. In my family, it wasn't the custom to read letters. Every generation asked the following generation to burn all their correspondence. But for some reason, nobody ever did this. The letters were stored in a desk drawer. And I inherited them. Since childhood, I've been very curious by nature. I'd peek into others' envelopes. I was told off for doing it. I felt ashamed. I'm still ashamed, but not as often and not as deeply.
