Description
Twenty weights, please is the story of two very important women of my childhood and life: my maternal grandmother and her daughter. With this personal project and my pictures of many places so meaningful for their memories, I want to celebrate these two women and theit life in London, in the 1950s.
Their strength, their ability to survive and to make do, in a big struggle but with great dignity, always inspired my desire to “be”. I started to collect every little thing, a small object or trace of my Grandma’s English time. I remember when she was still alive at her place – between a cigarette and a cup of tea – how her tales from that past captured my imagination.
I chose to resume and recollect the traces of their lives in a London that, although changed, still talks about that time. This project ideally begins with one of the first sentences my mother learned, “Twenty Weights, please”, while trying to buy some cigarettes (twenty) for her mother.
This is a diary: written and lived by them, read and re- written by me through an in-and-out-of-time journey which enters my present from the past, leaving me with a sense of melancholy. The images I shot over the last 20 years safeguard this emotional archive: no sign of time, just working places, the house, empty roads they ran with their bicycles, the market street full of leftovers, the light at the end of the day.
