The house that inhabits me still (2018-2020) :
Both my parents have passed away now.
As a child, I lived in a red house. My address was “the red house”, a place
my mother adored.
It had been closed up for 30 years, but its sale was imminent, so my sister
and I went to clear it out.
The house still had some furniture, three plum trees, four orange trees
and my entire childhood.
I strolled through the garden, which was not as big as I remembered… Tomorrow is a holiday, we will probably eat chicken with olives… My mother is baking “corne de gazelle” biscuits in the courtyard outside the kitchen… It is summer and the huge window in the lounge is wide open.
I approach it and see my father and sister peering at a book. There are books everywhere, but at night, no one read me children’s stories, they told me stories, because a long time ago, the most extraordinary things could still happen…
Tomorrow is a holiday. I will have a ribbon in my plait, I will not play too much in the morning to avoid ruining my shoes, but by the afternoon I will have forgotten they were new… I will watch my mother fix her hair in front of her mirror, perhaps she will wear her pale blue caftan…
I do not want this house to be sold, I want to preserve it on the eve of a holiday, in that eternal summer, enveloped, asleep, because it has never stopped being my address. The images in the series are shots of my childhood home, but also set pieces that evoke my childhood in that house… The prints are cyanotypes toned and enhanced with watercolour ‒ all the work is done by myself.
Aassmaa Akhannouch