In Development
As in House of Us 1 and 2, this space will combine visual installation and performance. The starting point for The Daughter is my own childhood, half a century ago, in the French countryside. The central theme is imagination. In those days there were none of today’s distractions, my only entertainment was a once a week Technicolor episode of Pippi Longstocking. My microcosmic bedroom was the center of my life, with just a magic cat for company and shelves bursting at the seams with children’s books, mostly fairy tales. I would listen and sing along for hours to my parents records, Judy Garland in particular. My Russian grandmother would invite me down to her room, as a treat, after bedtime, to introduce me to Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly and the wonderful world of Hollywood musicals, on television. Most days, when I wasn’t at school or in my bedroom, I would wander alone around the countryside, daydreaming. The reward of having to entertain myself most of the time was the gift of a limitless world of imagination. As a mother, I have been acutely aware of that disappearing mental space, the empty space of dreams and imagination, now filled with incessant screen time.
In House of Us- part 3: The Daughter, I will create several spaces: my old-fashioned childhood bedroom 50 years ago, and a contemporary daughter’s bedroom, the walls covered with hundreds of smartphone selfie portraits of young girls. The phone is today’s fairy tale, with the possibility of endlessly filming and photographing yourself, creating a fantasy narrative of your life, transforming your looks, changing yourself, with the help of Apps, into a ‘beautiful princess’. The audience can then walk through a large wardrobe full of clothes and enter into a fairytale wonderland, a dreamlike setting of snow-covered fir trees, ballerinas, dolls’ houses and fantastic creatures, images sprung from our collective imagination.
This will be a magical space, inspiring delight, and nostalgia, full of the sights and sounds of our childhood dreams.