M A T T E R O F  M E M O R Y

I visited the Island of The Dead in Venice on the 30st of December 2006 and made recordings of the ambience there. On some of the graves, tiny battery driven music boxes that had been placed only a few days ago. But the batteries were now running flat. This naturally caused them to play a rather disharmonic range of tones and not the melody they were supposed to play. At times they also distorted. The before so positive melody -jingle bells- now sounded rather helpless, almost like a kitsch metaphor for a fading life.

These photos are marble portraits from gravestones of dead people, who have been dead for so long, that their very image is now disappearing. Similar to our own fading memory, for our long dead relatives or friends, - our great grand parents who have been dead for several decades, do we remember how their faces really looked like? These disappearing portraits were for me a subtle methaphor for disappearing memory.

Click on the image in order to view the series.