Helena Civit

This work Haus und all` ‘House and cosmos’, takes up the title of the second chapter of the wonderful essay The Poetics of Space, by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. As he explains, our home is our corner of the world. And if we talk about our family home, we are talking about our first universe. The house is a cosmos that gives us protection and the illusion of stability.

As we know, human beings constantly reimagine and rewrite their reality, their microcosm.

 

Although she lives in Catalonia, Helena Civit has lived for several seasons in her mother's village in the south of Austria, in a rural and summer holiday area in the Alps. This particular and fragmentary experience of the territory - a home that is never fully known - is here turned into a photographic exploration. Straddling the line between the personal diary and the documentary gaze, between belonging and intrusion, from the threshold between inhabiting and observing, a vision of a landscape already over-signified, full of connotations, clichés and consolidated narratives that run through it is explored. A landscape made up of emotionally, culturally and ideologically charged layers, between which something living and unforeseen can be sensed. Photography is here a tool with which to observe the texture of a place and a moment, with the symbols, echoes and shadows that emerge. On the one hand, there is a desire to portray, even to catalogue or inventory a cosmos of forms - materials, customs, patterns, gestures, ornaments - in the manner of a glossary and personal archaeology. On the other hand, there is a desire to investigate the construction of a territory through its symbols and marks, and to question the very notion of belonging.