From Tarkovsky to My Grandmother and Vice Versa

Last semester I was walking around Sheepshead Bay and a rare house caught my attention, a house full of ornaments in its front yard. Questions and assumptions came to my mind. Who lives here? It is a hermit? It is an artist? The image of that house in front of the Shore Boulevard took me back in time to my grandmother’s house, it made me recall the memories of my childhood and adulthood observing my grandmother’s unique decoration style. I want to tell the story of this house and of the lady that lives there as a way of bringing back the memories of my grandmother and her house. Furthermore I want to tell this story as a way of telling my own story. In a way it will be a portrait piece with elements of auto-ethnography. (I don´t know if this tag striates the project!)

The fundamental things that resonate about my grandmother and my connections with this house and this lady are the memories of the objects of my granny´s house. I was always fascinated with the shelves full of saints, her glass dresser with little bottles of old perfumes, the plaster dogs and cranes at the entrance. Just like the lady in Sheepshead Bay the fact that my grandmother transformed her modern 50´s house into a pastiche has been always a shame for my family. Mildred family doesn´t like her decoration neither. The objects, the shame and that stubborn character of both ladies the one alive here in New York, and the other already death, but so much alive inside my mind, are the elements that I will like to approach in my video piece.

Is not easy to make the connections and that’s where Tarkoski and Godard inspire me. Only in the uncertain in the interval is where these memories will emerge to a new life. I believe that the only way of actually achieving the goal of this project is following Deleuze description of time image, combining shots in new ways, rejecting continuity editing, playing with time (the factual time and the subjective time - both mine and the viewers).

The other interest that I have with this project is repetition and the invisible links that our living experience is building. In this search I find associations with Bergson's Matter and Memory: each image exists in relation with all other images, the universe is always shifting it center, the perpetual movement of life.

I will use HD video footage from the lady and the house in Sheepshead, from NYC buildings, and found footage from NYC. The sound will include also the house, the lady and some of my thoughts and conversations with my sisters and my mother.

Susana