FAR FROM
IT
“A young woman recalls some of her last encounters with her father.
Through a fragmentary landscape of memory, she unravels a chronicle
of nostalgia, as preceived by two different generations.”
Looking at objects as carriers of nostalgia, and at material waste as part of our human nature, I speculate on whether a hoarder's room could possibly constitute a Wunderkammer of the future; a cabinet of curiosities destinated to re-introduce life on earth to human. I examine nostalgia as performed in the domestic space; through the collection and display of beloved objects as personal artefacts. The things we surround ourselves with are usually nostalgic traces, not only of past experiences, but also of general periods of time that we ourselves may never have known. When it comes to hoarding, a habit of compulsive accumulation of things, often accompanied with feelings of guilt, can tell us a lot about our society and how we learn (or not) to deal with inner needs, such as processing a trauma or mourning a loss.
Within the setting of a fictional post-apocalyptic scenario, wouldn't there be a shift of value around a plastic cup, if we realised that it might be the last one in the universe? Or around an empty packet of food, a jar filled with soil, a broken tv screen, and so on? This seemingly contradictive notion of treasure-looking trash indicates that value derives from the context, and thus, for a deeper comprehension and personal engagement in urgent matters, fictional storytelling can sometimes be a very powerful design tool: as a conversation starter, it adds new layers in the existing discourse, making it ever more accessible and inclusive.
Therefore, conceived as a short sci-fi story, FAR FROM IT attempts a zoomed-out view of earth as home that, we humans, are destroying; urging the audience to reflect on the topics of nostalgia and migration through the broader lens of the current climate crisis, and the inevitable end of the world as we know it. It is an installation that hovers between a theatre play and an audio book. Placed on a small stage, it is a set frozen in time; filled with traces of a performance that has already happened.
[duration 15min.]
photo by Athina Botonaki
photos by Sara Francola
photos by Athina Botonaki
photos by Erik de Vries
photo by Sara Francola
photo by Athina Botonaki
Guiding tutor: Nasim Razavian [ Studio Ilinx ]
Graduation Show exhibition / Royal Academy of Art, The Hague / Master Interior Architecture INSIDE / June 2024