Inheritance: the elder relatives series
December 6 – 29, 2001
The following tells the story of how this work came to be.
My Mother lived with her brother and her sister all of her life. For 32 years, they dwelt in the same 3-bedroom apartment, along with me and my grandparents. I moved away in 1981, and by 1992 my grandparents had passed away, leaving the 3 siblings alone.
My uncle collected everything from books to tweezers. On the eve of his birthday, in 1998, he went to bed at 11pm and was dead by 2 am. He never woke up. He left 2 rooms full of books, 3 cellars filled with obsolete mechanical instruments, and in the apartment, drawers were stuffed with little packages made out of flowery pattered rags. In them were an exotic assortment of metal tools, maternally wrapped. A large wooden case containing 537 keys and 3 surgical trays filled with oil and old, rusty wrenches sat on his desk for 8 months after his death. His sisters didn’t remove anything. Then my Mother died of a long denied illness and I took over the apartment.
My inheritance consisted of some money, a collection of scarred paintings, 2 old pugs with putrid breath, and a seventy year old aunt with a weak and broken heart. The walls of the house hadn’t been painted in almost 20 years. Magazines hadn’t been thrown out or recycled for 10 years. My aunt’s heart and kidney were failing because of heavy dosages of wrongly prescribed medications.
I spent 2 summers between the public dump and the hospital. In the house, I coordinated crews of workers while trying to console my aunt, who kept clinging to the past that was gone. They say that life is a circle, not a straight line. In those 2 summers, this thought generated fear and anxiety for me. I was afraid to work and find myself at the starting point all over again. I found myself on somebody else’s circumference and as I divided many numbers by π, I could not find the measure of the ray and the position of my center. In those days, I photographed to survive and to be reminded of who I was. I photographed to pay tribute to my ancestors that were no more.
A fine heart specialist and a successful bypass operation brought my aunt back to good health. Stucco and paint revived the apartment walls. And the delicate hand of an expert restorer erased the rips off the paintings that now sport a brilliant neutral patina.
Life is back to normal now, but my triptychs haunt me. They are the evidence of those times in life when one is exposed to the ephemeral nature of existence, and moments of joy are immediately followed by the fear of loss. It is in those moments when we face our fears that laughter is especially welcome, and comic and tender memories are held dear. These are the times in which little rusty chipped mementos seem essential because they give you the illusion that the past can be retained, when in fact it is gone. My triptychs combine the varied images that called to me throughout those two summers: of life and death, laughter and fear, love and loss.
The triptychs read left to right, and sometimes they bounce back, right to left. They are the emotional but incoherent speakers for a consciousness that has just realized that life is never a circle.
Paola Ferrario was born in Rho (Milan) Italy in 1963. She received an MFA from Yale University in 1988. Since then, she has completed narrative and documentary photographic projects in Italy, Guatemala, and the United States. Among her awards and fellowships are the Friends of Photography/Calumet Emerging Photographer award (2000), the Paul Taylor/Dorothea Lange Prize from Duke University (2001), a Puffin Foundation Grant (2003) and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography (2004). She is the author of “19 pictures 22 recipes”. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. She is represented by Sue Scott Gallery in New York and lives in New York and Western Massachusetts.