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.

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.

This is a short video of the current situation:

I am planning to continue filling the walls here with snippets of narratives from the house and the village, until they connect in a web of stories. When the walls are full, I might use a torch to film it in the dark, with just the lit up parts flaring up to be visible- again making the connection to the cave painting. Possibly, I use an IPhone torch, as this is a modern cave painting.

When the walls are filled and filmed, I will probably paint it all white again.