I am seated on my couch, my ears and thoughts ready to grasp, and interpret, whatever is happening around me: a wavering stream of feelings, the sound of silence echoing across an emptying space, that is deconstructing itself. Everything that seemed certain, established, organized and arranged along a series of habits, rehearsed and repeated, leisure and activities implicitly immovable, are now changing. Time is still running out, the space is closing in on itself, and the house walls mark a boundary with an outside world that I do not recognize. My heart is frightened. Sitting on the couch. In the hospital’s parking. Queuing at the grocery store. Waiting at the traffic lights. And now I recognize this world, within those same walls, among my thoughts and the thoughts of others, my emotions and others’ emotions. And I see it there, on hold. This is how Grave Times originates: it stems from a feeling, an intuition, first intimate, then rational, and ends by becoming empirical. It is the abrupt awareness of a space and time put on hold, through the daily exposure to the gravity such an interruption entails; it is the transposition, first as a feeling, then as a thought, and then depicted in images, of an inedited uncertainty, unexplored, unexpected and undesired. It is about our own life that has been interrupted, our daily habits hanging by a thread, this same thread that holds the objects fluctuating in the space surrounding me; and that become, through my photographs, a metaphor of the interruption that has affected everything; omens of an ineffable, sometimes incomprehensible immobility; that freezes the present and distances the future, whilst waiting for these Grave Times to pass, and for levity to triumph again.
