A home might be a place of habits, like a system of things that punctuate the act of living. It might appear in daily life as the reference of comfort, of well being, of seclusion, as storage of our memories, and also of the memories of others. It might not be anything of this or it might be something else. This home that we (re)visit here through exposed fragments was an arrival location. A place. From there to some place else or around this one. An action has been developed that is not only about the house, with being in this place, what it represents to change it, to transform it in a way to create a living space.

What happened here was a different thing. This house in Sarajevo, contains in itself the expectation of its inhabitants, the memories of their living, and at the same time of their survival. Sarajevo is a place in the world and occupies that position in a different way than other places. But at the same time our memory search us with so many forgotten ones. From here were voices of disagreement and of suffering, of war and death. No doubt, this house must have been a shelter of that tormenting experience, of the isolation, of incommunicability, of the distinction provoked by the disequilibrium of the elementary means for survival. In this house we can find the stubble of the harvested field and even though those remains left behind would give some comfort to the traveler. This could surely be the expectation from the one who leaves to return.

It is disturbing to look at these photographic framings and verify that they could be added or fitted in any other house that Susana knows and that is familiar to her. And what can we say - we do not know this house - when we look at these planes, that want to show us this or that object as main characters of a whole in which nothing denounces the passage of those ghosts of war and death.

Is this ambiguous non-relation with what we know about that place (?). And that this house is not hiding but is also non-containing. This place that appears to us as any other one is in fact a unique and particular place, because the theater that surrounds it is an exterior thing, which occupies a determined position - beyond. What motivation can lead to register the known and the banal that broke with the expectations set in the way to get there? The difference that the look recognizes in displacement. The distinction between the uniform mass that like a landscape, at a distance, seems to us formed by similar and sudden hues. But more closer, so closer - like being inside - they announce the particular, the unique. The framing do not chooses but hides, withdraws, and adds, concentrates. This look that is chosen through the interior of the photographic camera is in the same way particular, because it follow and fix, without restrains, the movement of dislocation.


João Silvério