The albums are in the bookcase above the living room daybed. Every time I go to visit Omama’s home, I devour them. I flip through the pages avidly, as if searching for something. I look at the pictures of when I lived in Vienna and spent afternoons with Omama. A naked girl in the garden, washing clothes in a basin, eating cookies on a bench, watering the plants. She looks happy.
I study the face of my parents, searching for some form of expression. After that, I became a fat girl. I think I look sad, ugly.
Every summer, we go to Vienna.
I remember the smell of the room, the creaking of the old wooden floor, the trees at the window, the cold mosaic in the bathroom, the dark stairway, the fear upon passing through the curtain that leads into the attic.
In the summertime, the garden was wet, filled with plants that grew wilder each year because no one trimmed them anymore. There I started the series of photos that recreate those of my childhood. Then I went to live in Vienna, in order to take photographs and take care of my grandmother.
When the house was sold, a company came for everything we couldn’t keep. They destroyed the furniture with axes, because they had no value. I sleep there for three nights on a cot, alone in the empty house.
I wake at dawn to film the way light travels through the windows, my steps through the rooms, with my super eight camera.