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  Persistency of Death (Desire of Memory), 2012 | 2012

I have never wanted to see a dead body. When my mum’s mother died I didn’t want to see her. It happened though that I had to give her a glance. Then, a few years later, my dad’s mother died and I saw her arranged body in the little chapel outside the hospital. There were flowers, I think, a lot of flowers, I think. I remember there were a lot of flowers on her but this is just not possible. She. Was. So. Still. So flawless. Her eyes were closed, I know that, but we were looking at each other. It was not creepy, it was just what had always happened. She was so serious. I remember expecting her throwing her tongue to me at any moment. I was so believing that, that my heart-rate was rushing. Even though my mind rationalised the stupidity of the thought, it could not grasp it fully. I was so shaken by this unresolvable fight that the overall effect was a complete stillness. I was like her. Hard and breakable. And I remember a feeling of possession: I felt as I was in possess of her. But I have never possessed her as little as in that moment. --------- A year ago I found a way to love the subjects of my pictures even more than I do when I photograph them. I scrape them with a knife. But my way of scraping is really slow and caring: I only remove the first layer of surface off the prints. It is still there, the image, like a ghostly presence. It is still completely flawless. It still looks and feels flat at the touch. There are yet no answers to any questions. The only way to understand a photographic print as a tridimensional object is to keep on scraping. Layer, by layer, each time one step down the illusion of understanding death. Until there is no image, no person, no landscape, no subject, no photographer. Only, always, stubbornly persistent death. --------- I bottled the thin layer of surface removed from the prints. And I threw on death the most lively, always and never the same, of the elements: water. Like my tears, that always occur when the subject is alive, but never occur in the hallucinatory illusion of possessing death. They are my desires. They melt in time into pure, dense colour; they layer as well, and change, from blue to pink and back. They are alive and immortal.