My grandmother lived in a beautiful house. It was big, and tidy and strange and interesting, hosting shades of colour the world of interior décor had long considered to be outdated. The house is gone now, sold to the medical invasion of laboratories that have occupied the once quiet, residential area. In its place is a space now waiting to replace her wooden furniture, carpeted stairs and tapestries of lounging ladies, with needles, white tiles, and the smell of sterility.  Nevertheless, this project is not about my grandmother’s house. It is about the tragic act of forgetting and the attempt of reconstruction. A sad effort to keep memory alive, even if that means keeping it on life support or resurrecting it back from the dead. Of course, words and images can only do so much. They can almost never capture the things that most make a house, or a person, or a day at the beach. But one can cling to the fragments. Fragile, fleeting things like the positioning of a chair, the echo in the bathroom, or the roses in the garden.  I believe that when things are lost forever, most people tend to cling to in whatever way they can.  Whether it’s by the delusion of nostalgia or the pragmatism of documentation, fading away is unforgivable. After all, a house is not just a house, even if that was its initial purpose. Beyond brick and concrete there was food and love and boredom and anger.  Which is why, I believe, it is a terrible thing to forget.

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This series was developed for the the Spring Sessions 2017 Residency final exhibition, and was displayed at the the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Art.