In several of the rooms, a lampshade is left dangling from the ceiling and some curtains left on the window. In a way, these lonely left over objects just emphasize the emptiness of the room.

This room is to the North and always cold and dark. It has a weird shape and really low ceiling to one side. When I first saw it, it had very much very dark, heavy furniture in it and I can still feel the energy of this dark heaviness lingering. It took me a good while to even clean it out and it is definitely the space I have spent less minutes in.

I will change this by making “an empty room” one of the objects for the parallel project and by using this whole room as my sketchbook to record many of the stories I hear about the village.

I plan to start different stories at different parts of the walls and then continue the narratives til they meet and create a pattern over the room. At some point, these walls will be smashed and I will collect the stories as dust in a suitable box.

Hera I am, ready to start. A whole white room as my white page. And now I need to decide where to put down the tip of my pen.

The dangling lampshade seems to be the center around which the space moves and I climb the ladder to start there.

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I start with my neighbor Donna Maria’s account of her first memory from when she was 3 or 4 years old and still little enough to be carried by her mother.

When I switch on the light, I am so happy I chose to start at this point in the room:

I start another story on the wall to the East, about Maria Jose walking to school with her little brother, the 4 km to the nearest primary school.

On the back wall, her granddaughter has a dog called Boss.

I realize that all three stories start with relationships- to the mother, to the dog, to the brother. I decide to leave the Western wall to a lonely figure- Donna Laura from the house on the other side of ours.

Her story is very sad. I will let it evolve around the figure in time.

I have written another blogpost about all the glass I have found, and some of the pieces are clearly from a car. I decide to let other parts of the walls start with stories about the cars from which these glasses came- using this room as a sketchbook:

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I prepared several different pens, with the idea of letting fainter drawings lie further back in time than thicker, clearer drawings. I will let go of this though, as I will use the walls more freely and allow myself to grab whatever pen is at hand at the moment.

Spinning these drawings together in stories adds the dimension of time engrained in the piece, as well as the two-dimensionality of the drawings and the three-dimensionality of the whole room.

I will resume the drawings now again on this fresh coat of paint. There will probably not be any grand finale with breaking the walls and collecting the dust, but this room will still be the sketchbook for the stories.

Suddenly we also live full time in the unrenovated house with all the family, due to the lock down, so today it occurred to me that our presence, our life here will weave into the sketchbook entries on these walls too. We already belong to the story of this house.

The new map of this “empty room” looks like this:

The motives of the sketches on the walls here will connect to all other parts of the parallell project.

Our presence here first appeared with small sketches from a photoseries I did with my daughter and granddaughter wearing  lampshades on their heads:

 

These are sketches for oil paintings that I logged more about under the part of the parallel project “lampshades”.

Also a sketch of my daughter longingly looking through the window after way too long in this house for quarantine:

To be continued