I deliberately thought about ruined scenes with a predetermined vision. Around my mother’s house, I recorded with a 35mm film camera the remains of vehicles that had become an ontological part of the place I lived during my stay for her dementia treatment as part of the collective memory.
My inspiration always comes mostly from my inner experiences and feelings; I transform these into non-verbal forms of self-reflection. I like to take my subjects and visualize them through layers of refraction or reflection, at least in some way pushing them towards abstraction. Often, this results in palimpsest images, where the ‘subject’ that can be sensed disappears only through multiple layers, textures, and translucent surfaces. In these images, I never want you to ‘reach’ the subject at first glance, but its presence is there: pieces of steel reflected in a window or refracted from a body. It requires a bit of imagination on the viewer's part to return to the photograph's subject. It is an artist herself.
Simply observing people and reality are excellent sources of inspiration and plausible connections with social memory of surroundings. Pain and feeling miserable are tense subjects demanded unconsciously in abandoned scrap cars. It is the same as when I last saw her restless and naked body. Jaundice caused her skin color to be greenish yellow and her whole body to have full purple needle holes.
My stranded memory in the Middle East, where my mother and I were born and raised, is that women are defined by their fertility, and this cultural tradition ends with the body structuring itself as a palimpsest throughout a woman's life.
Noted: my naked body in the scenes was recorded with a pinhole camera, which is a part of visual language.
My last word is, “We need to make up for the silence and taboo that ensures we know next to nothing about what happens to our bodies.”
