Silent Archive

The work series "Silent Archive" is a documentation of my grandparents' house in its abandoned state since their death. When my grandfather died in 2015, he left my grandmother behind in that house. Not able to grasp life without her husband, who was the centre of her existence for over 60 years, she started successively drifting away into dementia. After my grandmother was put into special care, the house remained untouched and became a silent archive of personal items that had structured their daily rituals, habits and passions.
The photographic part of the series aspires to grasp an encoded form of identity, daily rituals and family legacy, which lie in basic objects and tools that shape our everyday lives.

Collecting

My grandfather was a passionate collector of local Bavarian art and craft. After my grandparents’ deaths, my mother and I started to dismember the enormous collection he had accumulated over 60 years.

These photographs show the imprint collected objects leave physically on the wall and metaphorically on someone’s identity. Collecting was not just a hobby for my grandfather; it was a form of defining himself culturally and reconnecting his identity with an (often religious) world around him. Consequently, the photograph questions the conjunction between identity and collecting and what happens to the objects once a person dies.

Belief

My grandparents lived in the Bavarian Forest, the eastern zone of Bavaria, an independent south-eastern state in Germany. Both of them were part of a very conservative community with a solid bond to Catholicism.

This photograph shows the reading lamp in my grandparents’ house in front of the bookshelves that contained numerous versions of the Old and New Testaments. After my grandparents’ death, those religious objects, which were deeply incorporated into their lives, remained traditional decorative objects without further use. Consequently, this photograph questions the importance of belief in the present day and what might have taken its place.

Walking stick and umbrella

Whenever my grandfather left the house, he carried a walking stick or umbrella as a fashionable accessory. It gave him the appearance of aristocratic authority and manly honourability.

The photograph shows the umbrella stand where he assembled his walking sticks and umbrella collection. It recalls a patriarchal tradition of high social status and a sign of power for men visualised through these accessories since the 17th century. However, freezing the walking stick collection in a photograph raises the question of whether this tradition dissolved inconspicuously or transformed into less obvious demonstrations of power and status.

Genealogy

The work shows the photo gallery in my grandparent’s bedroom. It raises the question of whether my identity can be independent of family history or if I am, as an offspring, determined to be an accumulation of ancestral genes, social coding and education.

Moreover, the photograph juxtaposes the understanding of partnership after WWII and in the present. Coming back to Germany after five years in war and seven years in imprisonment in Russia, for my grandfather, the partnership with my grandmother was much more than a romantic venture; it was a silent therapeutic survival.

5 am

My grandmother would get up at 5 am every day and go to the anteroom on the first floor where the hanger would be, holding her clothes for the day, which she had picked out carefully the day before. Then, after putting on her clothes, she would hang her nightgown instead and go down into the ironing room to start with her work for the day.

This work reflects upon my grandmother’s generation, where the woman as a housewife was not only a patriarchal role defined by domestic labour but also a life structure and rhythm.

Glimpse

The photos of the bedrooms focus on moments of privacy that belong to people who no longer physically exist and question the dependency of domestic concepts on former physicality.

Sneaking through a lightly opened bedroom door or seeing a slice of the bedroom through a mirror reflection, the viewer is deprived of insight into the actual room and its interior. This keeps the viewer at a distance and forces them to complete the image through phantasy. This distance also translates into the idea of memory, which is never complete but a restricted glimpse into the past.

Soap

I still remember the scent of the cheap supermarket soap my grandmother would dissolve into a washbasin filled with water. As a child, I would sit at its edge, holding my feet into the water, watching her scrubbing my feet with a washcloth.

The soap in the photograph captures this ritual of washing feet. It is like a rudiment of a past habit that formed my understanding of hygiene as a child. Hygiene is a socially charged behaviour that either functions as a point of access to social situations or as a status of exclusion.

Ritual

Before leaving the house, my grandmother would put on her silk scarf, hat, perfume and lipstick. It was a rehearsed ritual. As a young child who wanted to learn to be a woman, I stood beside her, observing the procedure.

The two photographs show makeup products I found in my grandmother’s drawer after her death. Staged like promotional photographs but with rust and stains, it questions my perception of being a woman. How much did my grandmother’s ritual unconsciously find its way into my identity as a woman two generations later and after four waves of feminism?

Belongings

After my grandparents’ death, my mother and I went through their belongings to figure out what to do with them next. The house had become a hodgepodge containing 60 years of passionate collecting of Bavarian and Catholic culture. Many of those objects are reminders of the constantly passing Zeitgeist and will be thrown away eventually despite their former monetary and emotional value.

The photograph shows the beginning of our attempt to select items to toss away and our inability to do so, considering the fully stacked bookshelves. It is a conversation between generations about how the understanding of value changes.

Client

Personal Project

Year

2022

Venue

Private Estate

Place

Bavaria, Germany

Artist

Emilia Annabella Radmacher

Photo credits