SqW:Lab explores the domestic, usually through drawing and process. During the lock down in Mumbai, SqW:Lab fellows are responding to The Confluence Collective’s call out for photos of our homes. Here are some of the SqW:Lab fellows responses:
Below is a photo by Ana Čavić of her favourite corner in her home in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and below is a note from Ana about how she is feeling right now and responding with a quote from a poem:
In isolation, I am thinking about the importance of our personal libraries, the books that nourish and sustain us throughout our lives. Alberto Manguel, the most beautiful of writers and a one time state librarian, is almost a fetishist when it comes to books. He once wrote that he considers every book in his personal library irreplaceable, since each is personal to him and bears the traces of his having turned their pages and spent time with them. For him, books are more than mere objects, they are charged with memories poured into them so that each re-reading of a book is a re-visiting of your past self. This corner is the place I go to for solace. I select a favourite volume of poetry: Michael Dransfield, an Australian poet from the 1970s who died too soon. As I re-read a poem that has become a part of me–‘King Ludwig’s Swans’–I am astonished to find new meanings in it I hadn’t seen before. I reflect on the world as it is today and I recall how it was when I read it for the first time, the time after that and so on. Finally, I set it down and I imagine how it might be when I read these lines again in the future:
their armies do not come
they fear the flowers
Above is a photo by Charlie Levine of a series of corners, lines, shapes, light and shadows in her bedroom in Forest Hill, SE London, with a snippet from Stuart Morgan’s ’Vice-Versa’, 1992, article.
“We will not understand black holes until we encounter one. And since their eccentricities come into play so gradually, we may not realise what is happening when we do. Entering the penetralia of the universe, where, in the guise of an insane housemaid, God turns reality outside in, inside out, time and again, as if folding a sock, we are held in some steady stay, in which secrecy and openness are neither identical nor opposite but components of a single, complex movement.
Will this be visible? Or will everything seem the way it was before? Perhaps looking will no longer qualify as a instrument of knowledge l. In a black hole, visible and invisible will meet, the moment of meeting will be prolonged and in one simultaneous expansion and contraction will translate into a new mode of visibility, present though perceptible only as absence. “
Above is a photo of Vishwa Shroff & Katsushi Goto‘s home in Colaba, Mumbai, and quote from ‘A Journey Around my Room’ by Xavier de Maistre selected to represent thoughts of this space at this time: “My Room is situated in latitude 48 degree east, according to the measurements of Father Beccaria. It lies east and west, and, if you keep close to the walls, forms a parallelogram of thirty-six steps around”
Below is a photo by Veerangana Solanki and a reflection on the lock down in India & her favourite corner in her home: “The human imagination which grasps and unifies time has always had the capacity of undoing time. This capacity is closely connected with the faculty of memory. Yet time is undone not only by being remembered but also by the living of certain moments which defy the passing of time, not so much by becoming unforgettable but because, within the experience of such moments there is an imperviousness of time…All photographs are possible contributors to history, and any photograph, under certain circumstances, can be used in order to break the monopoly which history today has over time” John Berger, ‘Appearances’ in ‘Ways of Telling’
During this time for isolation, I’ve been in the countryside (fortunately) with the option of having nature and the garden as a corner for home – while reading Berger under a tree, these flowers took me back to my childhood when we made floral jewellery, and collected bees and nature tales.
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