things will remain to turn off the lights of the world

This essay revisits an abandoned flat from my early childhood, reanimating its objects through photographs and assemblages. In an era of excess and erasure, the work shifts the gaze toward things as silent witnesses, proposing new ways of inhabiting memor

This project originates from an abandoned flat that I have been photographing since 2017, located in the city where I was born, in the countryside of the state of Rio de Janeiro. I lived there during the first months of my life with my parents. It was also the home of my maternal great-grandmother until near the end of her life, alongside her paintings, domestic objects, and the traces of a quiet, unassuming existence. The project consists of an ongoing series of photographs and assemblages created from materials found in the flat, developed over several years through repeated visits and sustained observation.

Through these images and material interventions, the work proposes a displacement of the gaze — a counter-narrative to dominant historical perspectives centred on human agency and possession. At its core are multispecies relations and things stripped of their original functionality: what anthropologist Tim Ingold describes as “things” understood not as static objects, but as occurrences — processes in formation. By attending to what remains, to what grows, decays, stains, and accumulates, the project invites a position of alterity in relation to the built environment and to memory itself.

Left in abandonment and, more recently, used as a site for discarded materials from a neighbouring shop, the flat has gradually taken on ghostly contours. The people who once inhabited it are no longer present, and lived memory begins to blur. Yet the material traces persist. Wood swells and sprouts; walls crack; humidity stains doors and ceilings; dust and debris accumulate. These subtle movements reveal an autonomous vitality within matter, unsettling fixed hierarchies between subject and object. Rather than functioning as passive remnants of a past life, these elements actively reorganise space, proposing new forms of coexistence and temporality.

The project unfolds through close observation and a sustained engagement with this site of personal and collective memory. By combining photography with assemblages that recontextualise found materials, the work seeks to excavate layers of time embedded in surfaces and objects. The flat becomes not only a former domestic interior, but a living terrain where absence, transformation, and persistence intersect.

In a historical moment marked by climate catastrophes, wars, epidemics, and the excessive production of consumer goods driven by capitalist systems, we are confronted with the consequences of anthropocentric worldviews. We produce more than we will ever consume, while averting our gaze from the growing landscapes of waste. By turning attention back to what has been left behind — by gathering, observing, and re-signifying what persists — this project suggests another mode of relating to matter and memory. Through careful looking and material engagement, it proposes that listening to things, rather than dominating them, may open pathways for imagining different forms of inhabiting the world.