Project

Gerief tells the story of 2 adult children emptying the house of their mother, who placed great value in her secondhand finds. Returning to their childhood home brings up a lot of clutter, not only belongings but also unprocessed family dynamics. At the beginning of my process, I had started exploring the idea of "Sonder," the realization that others lead lives just as complicated and vivid as one's own. I was also drawn to the idea of a personal paradise. For this, I looked around my surroundings to draw people and fantasize about what kind of people they were and where their personal paradise might be, based on assumptions or small fragments of their conversations. From these drawings, I extracted 4 characters and began thinking about how they related to each other. But soon I came to the conclusion that individual paradises would be difficult to represent. A personal paradise was not necessarily a tropical place from the very beginning; it could just as easily be a person, an event, or a place without palm trees. One of these was also "grandma's kitchen" for me. I continued with this. Gerief tells the story of a brother and a sister emptying the house of their mother, who liked to surround herself with her secondhand finds. Rummaging through the parental house unleashes a lot, both memories and unprocessed family dynamics. These characters soon became close to me as well. I myself was still far too young to fully realize that emptying my grandmother's house had unleashed a lot within the family. But unconsciously, this became the subject of my master's thesis.