Everything started with a collection of images that turned into a typology of homes, using illustration to put them on an equal footing.
Then came experiments like recontextualization, construction and deconstruction.
Later, I asked myself questions that helped me through my research process. What would our houses look like if we could see the mixture of different cultures through architecture? Combining parts of houses from around the world.
Why do we care so much about our houses? Bachelard states that understanding the house is a way to understand the soul. This approach to houses was one of the first texts I’ve read on the subject and it enabled me to understand that I wasn’t interested in the building itself but more in human relationships to home. Our houses are witnesses of our everyday lives, and I believe we are attached to them because of memories and experiences we carry within us. So I drew my house of memories which made me wonder how to make a house tell a story before getting that, once again, I had to turn to others because Illustration is inclusive and people orientated.
What makes you feel at home? I drew the answers and that’s how I realised the gap between my imagination and the reality that I didn’t know. I had understood that illustration allows for interpretation, flexibility with memory when physical objects or photography don’t as much.
So I redrew again and again a similar object (changing the color, the size…) before showing it back to the original person to see if they still think of home when they look at it. I wanted to explore the idea that one form can bring back many different memories and thus, somehow, create links between people. So I showed it to others, using illustration as a prompt for interaction about memory, and asking myself what level of similarity to the original do we need to make connexions.
How far can we go before it’s just a random object that doesn’t mean anything?
Having had time to move on a bit, I realised that the bridge between the reality that I didn’t know and my own imagination could be something really interesting to explore further through iterations. I thought of postcards as they always get sent to people who weren’t there when the events happened, but is also used to report something. I started to create images of my memories, aiming again to give form to something that is formless.
Then came the idea of randomly collecting images from Google Maps of places where I have never set foot, thus questioning the link between a real moment that has passed and one that never existed at all. I have started to redraw them and plan to start a correspondence of fictional travel, closely linked to what is happening to us right now. Everything must change so that everything can stay the same said Lampedusa.