This project began with my grandparents’ living room, where I spent most of my childhood afternoons. It was warm and sunny, and full of small rituals: minestrone with beans, cookies in the cupboard, and a red telephone on the side table. It was a space of stability and care, what I now understand as quiet resilience.
You lived three floors above me. I came by every day. Sometimes for lunch, sometimes after your nap. You always had sweets, especially Duplo chocolate and Mulino Bianco cookies. As years passed, the cupboard emptied. Sweets were replaced by medication. You forgot recipes, but never my name.
To revisit that space, I reconstructed the room using the gobelin technique she taught me. The walls are fragmented. The stitching left incomplete. It reflects the way dementia slowly eroded not just her memory, but the textures of our shared world.
As my world was becoming bigger, yours was becoming smaller.
The intervention, fragmented walls and a sacred clay well, reflects this transformation. Inspired by sacred wells I recently visited, I imagined memory as something sacred, deep and fluid: something we draw from, imperfectly. Threads flow from the well like memories: tangled, lost, or leading home.
Memory as ritual.
Water as thread.
There’s a line between the ancient and the now.
Between you, and me, and whatever came before and will come after.