HEIRLOOMS
After my grandparents passed away, their former home became just an empty shell of their former life, filled with their possessions. The process of clearing it out has dragged on for over ten years due to indecision about what to do with the property. I grew up right next door, so I was able to watch it deteriorate. When a house is left to its own devices for so long, with no human intervention, it develops its own narratives. The objects that have lasted generations rearrange themselves, and the materials begin to become one again. The series was created shortly before the demolition. Today, the property is no longer owned by my family.
Location
Aumühle
Year
2018
HEIRLOOMS
After my grandparents passed away, their former home became just an empty shell of their former life, filled with their possessions. The process of clearing it out has dragged on for over ten years due to indecision about what to do with the property. I grew up right next door, so I was able to watch it deteriorate. When a house is left to its own devices for so long, with no human intervention, it develops its own narratives. The objects that have lasted generations rearrange themselves, and the materials begin to become one again. The series was created shortly before the demolition. Today, the property is no longer owned by my family.
Location
Aumühle
Year
2018
HEIRLOOMS
After my grandparents passed away, their former home became just an empty shell of their former life, filled with their possessions. The process of clearing it out has dragged on for over ten years due to indecision about what to do with the property. I grew up right next door, so I was able to watch it deteriorate. When a house is left to its own devices for so long, with no human intervention, it develops its own narratives. The objects that have lasted generations rearrange themselves, and the materials begin to become one again. The series was created shortly before the demolition. Today, the property is no longer owned by my family.
Location
Aumühle
Year
2018
Manchmal ist der Himmel über uns offen.
The series seeks an examination on the concept of home. Sarah Grethe accompanies her mother's return to the place where she grew up: a farm in southern Germany. In the confrontation of an idealizing view and the distance from the actual place today, tensions between familiarity and strangeness, constancy and change become visible. They clarify how home and origin can both carry and constrict.
The title (engl. Sometimes the sky above us is open) refers to a quote from a letter her mother sent to her parents in 1999. When she found it again while doing research for the project, she couldn't believe that she wrote the letter herself. How does home change for a person when she hasn't lived there for a long time? And when she returns?
