Sonnet XXVI

I work with my grandmother’s archive trying to find an explanation for deaths of all her lovers. I pay attention to the recurring trauma, as well as to the willingness of a woman who lives in mourning through every relationship to turn to magic.

One day I found in my grandmother’s belongings a little red book. There was an enclosure inside it: a great number of tiny pictures of women getting married could be found under the cover. When I ran over them, I got a creepy feeling. I understood that the redundancy of these pictures could be caused by my grandmother’s personal affliction.

My grandmother was 20 years old when her first husband, my grandfather, died after an extended illness. The men she loved after him died for different reasons: in a car accident, from a heart attack, brain cancer, mushroom poisoning. My grandmother’s last hope were magic rituals which would help her ‘bring a man back home’. She wrote down these rituals, step-by-step, in her red book.

In my work I pay attention to the recurring trauma, as well as to the willingness of a woman who lives in mourning through every relationship to turn to magic. I work with my grandmother’s archive and try to relate tragic events and find an explanation for them in the past.