my Family

my family

my Family book is a collection of about 1500 photographs taken from sissy farassat’s family life: father, mother, sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, their partners, their pets, their habits, their nature, their living spaces… pictures of a new born child, a cat, flowers, an old gentleman, men playing football… the everyday, all that is familiar. sissi farassat set herself the task of taking at least one photograph a day through six months. this was not so much an attempt to document as it was to extract the closeness to her family (something that is always part of her work) from the background and to declare it as the foreground.

a dairy in note form emerged alongside the pictures that is in stark contrast to the picture sequences. scenes are briefly referred to in colorful language, obscure contexts and funny sequences so that the year reads like a day.
the conciseness and speed characteristic of each word stands in contrast to the seemingly endless collection of images. our perception is challenged to confront the immediate interpretation of the word with the actual photograph, which is supplemented by our own personal reservoir of experiences on the theme of family.

It is mother’s day and we visited granny at the graveyard. she is always with me

the absence of mother’s day as well as of the grandmother in the picture tears open a series of images in our minds that are connected to what sissi is showing us in the respective photographs. Let us focus our attention on sissi’s album and try to read our own personal family album in her image and text stories. we experience in a very abstracted form the very game that sissy demonstrated in her light-boxes with movement sensors: she lures us with the same field of tension between image and text and then leaves us to our own form of distantiation.