“But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.”
― Tim Parks
What can be more comforting than jumping in the family past looking for evident traces of DNA? The comfort to be part of something bigger than us passed down by our ancestors.
Now we call them “serial hoarders” but until the second half of 1900 they were simply people able to survive converting the waste in a resource. A cane was not bought but created carving the branch of a tree, when it got broke was fixed with a metal plate and it was kept for generations as a piece of art.
I’m the fifth generation. This cane arrived from my great great grand father. He was a lamplighter when the lamps were still powered by oil. The lamps needed to be refilled with the right quantity of oil, based on the moon and the weather forecast, lighted one by one at the sundown and turned off at dawn to not waste any expensive oil. Every day, every night. In the middle the time for carving a cane.
This series of images is part of a larger project, I simply call DNA, to document objects that tell me the stories of my family. A much larger, ongoing, project… this is what happen with 5 generation of “serial hoarders” and houses large enough to allow the storage!
