In my work “Vitrine,” I aim to revive the memory of a display cabinet from my grandparents’ home. The vitrine hosted fractions of echoes from the world that they had left behind. It was their “cabinet of curiosities,” through which they could tell stories. Every item represented an era, a memento from a period of time long past. The vitrine’s various objects included photographs of siblings and family members who were gone, and boxes of paper which held arbitrary segments of my grandparents’ lives.
The items on display were placed in a mannered order: porcelain dishes, hand-embroidered napkins, exhibiting a restrained aesthetic. Echoes of old anxieties were hidden in the depths of the vitrine, next to other objects.
These echoes could also be found under my grandparents’ perfectly made-up beds. This is where they accumulated their emergency stores, in case another world war ever broke out.