Preface by Jeanette Land Schou

Everything changes value according to its context. We know this without giving it much thought. Those stones your mother collected on a beach somewhere carry a special weight because she brought them home to the garden. Yet if we lose such a stone it becomes weightless and insignificant, disappearing among the multitudes. We have the ability to animate objects, to imbue them with meanings that fade or are lost once the narrator disappears.

 When my father had to go into a nursing home we cleared out his house for sale. He left ample collections of all sorts of things from his workshop and his gardening. These included articles my mother had left behind and that he had never had the heart to discard. Traces of her actions: yarn, kitchen implements and other things that seemed to indicate she had just slipped out for a moment. He kept these mementos to stop her from disappearing entirely. We retain things as memories and I have photographed a number of them. The plants - collected over many years - carry stories of summers and winters and the light in the garden. I had to include them too.

In classical still-lifes each object and each plant carries a meaning indicative of a Christian world-view. We too seek significance in the things we own, inherit or find: inserting them into a context, albeit it may not be a religious one. They indicate our individual stories, our shared, modern history.

In conjunction with the Memento photo series I am grateful to be able to present a poem by Claus Handberg Christensen as well as a text by Camilla Kragelund. I am grateful for everything I received from home.

Jeanette Land Schou - 2013

Poem by Claus handberg Christensen
my mother fell
the dust lifted and
lay reverently three centimeters
above the floor in the apartment
until I arrived, opened the door
entering
some sort of museum

objects survive us in silence
they watch us
as in Hammershøjs' painting
where the chambermaids' back is out of focus
and the vase on the bureau
laughs at her mortality
its shiny sharpness
an heirloom
she, on her way  

as I remember the painting
she touches the vase lightly
in the same way I touched the ceramic lamp
that hung over the coffee table in the living room
after I had shut the door behind me

in wonder at the humility of the place
pushed to a distance
by the objects sudden freedom
I stood there
the returning son
and looked for my mother
in the cupboard and in the thimble  

I want to see the film
that all things hide inside themselves
find a place in the apartment that was never touched
because such a place must exist
in theory
and that place (must) be called no ones