Why it must.  Central space, adjacent rooms and end (5)

The idea to create a kind of pond of bottles that have soundscapes of the depicted poem in the central space was among the first images that formed in my head. After the heaviness of the body room, this had to be a hinge to the rest of the exhibition. I wanted to show that heaviness can also consist of a lightness as a kind of incubator for a new shackle. For this soundscape, I imagined a voice with a lighter tone, a voice that was able to move to all corners and sides.

One year before I opened my exhibition I started up talks with Russell Kadima (TK Russell), an artist, of whom I intuitively felt, had to do the soundscape. The professionality and empathetic power to become - as Russell himself called it - my inner voice, enriched my creative process. The poem is interpreted in four different ways in the soundscape and as visitors pass by the pond of bottles they trigger one or more speakers hidden in the bottles.

Lightness in the heaviness, joy in death, comfort in departing, gratitude for a retold memory, realizing that time is neither a way forward nor backward but an entity that is part of everyone’s inner mass - these pixels in my writings embody the poems from the rooms adjacent to the central space to the final corridor.

During the months preceding my exhibition, my mother had reached the final phase of her life. Completely bed-ridden and demented she was searching for reality. She still recognized me and in the way she looked at me, I could see our emotional bond was still preserved. Only the act of giving birth to a daughter was something she didn’t know. She was grateful when I talked about my dad because she had no recollection of him. I told her about my exhibition in my desperate attempt of sharing that with her - it failed but the fact that I told her made it more real to me. 

The first room adjacent to the central space contains poems that I have written for and about my mother (the poem at the start of this article is one of them). Two brothers visiting the exhibition talked to me for an hour afterward. They had been moved because they knew all about witnessing dementia in a loved one. They recognized.

My mother had stayed at home during the last years of her life but some years earlier I had to bring her sister, my aunt and godmother, to a nursing home. She only lived there for a few months but that parting urged me to fold words over it as if I wanted to cover and embrace her one more time.

The warm inside of my right arm still remembers the print of my last embrace with my father the night before he died. In the various spaces next to the central one, I thank my deceased family members and dear friends for what they have left me. In one of the rooms, I rolled out a big white roll of paper and hung it over a sofa. On it, I wrote texts balancing between prose and poetry. They tie together all rooms of the exhibition and I continued writing on these texts during the months the exhibition was open. After the Ghent Festivities of 2019, the exposition closed for two weeks to reopen again on the 15th of August, and again I continued writing further on the roll of paper. Meanwhile, my mother had died on the first of August.

Walking towards the end of the exhibition through the lightroom visitors enter the corridor where 50 tiles are hung up with seemingly absurd lines in yellow and blue. They all are word combinations to make letter words of WEG and aWAY.

The finale is formed by two works. The line of thinking on the questioning of the linearity of time hangs at the exit. A young couple tells me that they have been talking all day about the themes present in the poetry. Coincidentally they walked into the exhibition and say they actually want the last work for their living room.

I hear two elderly visitors talking in the corridor: she is right, they say, it is Einstein but in her way. We are scientists, they explain later and they stay for quite some time to talk to me.

With this online reopening, I look back on the many visitors and on the gratitude, respect, and appreciation I could receive. I share the poems in the portfolio of DeadPoet for all who want to read them. I end this five-day period of looking back with the final work.

Strive

for that moment

past

fasten it with chains

and run away with it

further