I'm sitting at my grandpa's house's table. I've always loved this house. Even when it's hot outside, the house stays fresh, and there's another house in front that has reflective windows, so I get to look at the clear sky. At night, I hear crickets. During the day, I hear pigeons. Most of my life, I've wondered what it is about the city that I'm living in that configures how I behave and feel. But this is like a small mind oasis - I don't think about the <outside world>, because the inside world here is so contained, and so rich. In front of me, there are pictures of my ancestors, preserved by my grandfather, who was a hobbyist photographer when he was young. He tells me that his cousins and siblings haven't made it past 87, which seems to be the limit for them. He's currently 85.
Analog portrait of my grandmother by my grandfather
It makes me wonder, how much my love for him is rooted in this space, a house that hasn't changed since I was a small child and visited here. We have different ideologies, and I'm always wondering how much of him I'm leaving behind when I reject his values and ideas. I feel afraid of losing so many things if I lose him. Not just him, the person that I love, but a whole family history, the anchor that he's cultivated in this house. The questions that keep coming up when I am physically confronted with the space where I learned about presence, that aspect of love that was not cultivated in my own nuclear family.
A framed photo of my great grandmother and grandfather getting married.
It makes me think of infrastructures of memory. How my grandfather has cultivated contemplation, presence, a slow way of living, repair and preservation of his own things (yesterday, we were looking at some new trash cans through Amazon, to replace one that he's had for more than 20 years!). He comments on every photo we send him, looks at every little detail. I also wonder if the photos he has carefully arranged in albums and photo frames of all the family are not only infrastructures of memory, but infrastructures of belonging and identity. It's not always beautiful or warm - these photos also remind me of hard moments. Asking him about the men and women in the black and white photos bring stories: english miners from San Luis Potosí, our great great grandmother who was married against her will at 14 years old.
I think about building this type of infrastructure in our time, where we all know that the volume of images makes it hard to really observe them, make space for our memories, thoughts and associations. I wonder about building a local tool where we can store images and comment on them. I want to be able to send this link to my grandfather and family, where he can upload a photo and through guided questions, me and my family can be incentivised to look at the images more carefully, just like he does.
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References:
https://runyourown.social/