A shadow in the shape of a house
What does life look like from the other side?, cannot only be asked in regards to the other side of the globe. The unfamiliar lies much closer. What marks the line between the known and the unknown?
A mirror. A skin. A street.
I don’t feel alone in the house; quite the opposite. It actually feels like someone else was here with me, someone I’m not sure I can be friends with. There is an uncomfortable presence in the back of my neck, especially when the sun is gone.
I’m wondering if maybe it’s the house itself. Or perhaps it is my own mask revealing itself to me; a disguise now peeling off like cracked, dry skin that has been itching for many years.
But no house is ever really dead. Even if no soul walks in and out, the house still has a soul itself. I know that now. Things are alive and they move.
The walls bend under the winter’s snow and make the wooden bars of the roof crack. The leaves of the almost dead plant on the window sill tingle in the warm air that evaporates from the radiator below it. A bug makes a plastic bag crinkle in the dusty cellar, whereas the dust dances a slow dance in the light beam breaking through the shack. The light itself moves through the rooms of the house, slowly and gently, as the minutes pass. And so this spectacle unfolds, while one might think that nothing is happening simply because one is not there. How important we take ourselves as we move in this world...
When in fact all matter is in constant motion.
When have you last been alone for a full day? If that entails no contact to anybody, be it physical or digital, have you then ever been all by yourself for a full day? What insights can one gain from solitude?
A shadow in the shape of a house is the visual and textual result of three weeks spent in isolation in the uninhabited house right opposite of my childhood home, secluded from any distraction through people or media. I crossed a physical and a mental threshold as I began to see behind two different façades: the one of the house I had looked at for many years while growing up in a small town in Tyrol and my own façade as a person, unwillingly formed through cultural and societal influences and continuously changing ever since I went to live abroad.
Returning home as a peculiar and withdrawn neighbour to my own family, I explored traces of former residents, new desires stemming from the state of personal autonomy and unfamiliar perspectives on the familiar.
The work is a collection of photographs and texts - fragmented reflections on the reasons and findings of this experience.
