Bas Wilders
Stay

We pass, pass like everything.

Dreams and hope lead us to the moment where we finally come off, where everything is together again.

My mother lives every day just like yesterday and tomorrow, her dreams will remain dreams and her hope is not anymore for herself. The house has become the world, experiencing the dimension is related to the size of the life that is repeating there every day.

During my visits I imagine traveling her travels, I try to imagine what far and deep could mean yet. I look across the table at the traces, the tiny organisms in the wide tiny world that my mother has left. The landscape is home to the eternity where no major changes are taking longer place.

During Christmas the rituals are repeating themselves as written by carbon paper. My mother in the kitchen, preparing the food as every year, so trusting and reassuring the same. It is a ritual, my mom work long days in the kitchen, the family gathered together around the table, eating like wild animals the annual prepared rabbit while my mother cares in the kitchen for the dessert, always cake with chocolate cream. I see the traces, I see the tiny remains.

In the evening she sits on the couch, she sleeps. I am cautiously, happy, she sleeps.

I look at her carefully, I wish it could be forever.

Ever smaller, ever softer I feel her, noiseless with little steps the life disappears.

My mother had dreams, the future was once of gold. It has always remained just the luster, the fulfilling of the dream itself is lacking time.

I’m looking for my position, I keep distance, I think and feel, I talk with closed mouth but eyes wide open. I crawl to her and smell myself.

In this series I try to summarize the dimension of the life of my mother, the nakedness of a life full of melancholy devoid of sentiment. I mirror myself in time as long as I can.

Bas Wilders