Unconditional Belonging

Borders are something my grandparents’ generation grew up with. Borders in Europe, within Germany, within families. After the war, while my grandparents were still very young, the region I’m from became a part of France for a short period of time. To go to their home country they had to pass a border all of a sudden, cause the area they lived in didn’t „belong“ anymore.

German society has, however, suppressed these experiences, its own struggle to overcome borders, a topic that now relates only to „the others“. Borders are meant to keep others out and to divide rather than being a means to connect.
Did we not ask our grandparents enough? Did they not want to talk about their experiences? And now, as the years have passed by, their generation has crossed over other kinds of borders from where we can no longer reach them: death, dementia.

A family home is reduced to an empty space where time and grieve draw new borders leaving old memories out of reach. A feeling of emptiness, while what has been lost, lies on the other side of a dimmed glass, reflecting back.
I chose to capture the feelings I encountered within my grandparents’ deserted house. I was drawn to its very emptiness, as well as particular objects that represent family stories and personal reflections. I found myself at once both literally inside the house but also outside of it, like documenting the life of strangers. Clinging to any sense of belonging in an empty house with only an echo of moments spent in it.

But what this project did also reveal, with the deafening silence of objects, is the tension and loneliness of things unsaid, experiences untold. With the loss of our grandparent’s generation, we lose their stories too. We also lose this unconditional love and belonging that grandparents provide as the very antidote to feeling lost in this world created by borders.