To All the Beds I Loved is an art project inspired by the French writer Georges Perec, which revolves around the spatiality of personal memories. It has been exhibited in Magasin Lotus gallery in Copenhagen in December 2018, and has been published in Sarmad Book Five: Home (2020) and showcased as part of the Fictioning Comfort exhibition in MaMA‘s Showroom in Rotterdam in summer 2020.
Statement
“J’aime mon lit.” – Georges Perec, Espèces d’espaces, 1974
There are times when I lie down on my bed and I sink into my sheets as the storm of nostalgia hits me. Places, faces, names, words, all rush through my head, and I dream of a lost time. Memories are elusive. It is hard to grasp them while one leads to the other and holes are left unfilled. I strive for a point of reference.
I think of all the places where I have slept. No matter how exceptional or mundane, how long or short my day had been, at the end of it I have slept – somewhere. That is a point of reference. My bed, be it a king size, a couch, a torn mattress or the laid-back seat of a bus, is a point of reference for my memories.
These beds and these places however, have no meaning outside of my memories. To other people, they are simply spaces. To me, they trigger countless memories that drift away but, in the end, come home to these spaces. Places where I have slept house my memories.
Inspired by Lieux où j’ai dormi, Georges Perec’s never-fulfilled project to describe in writing the places where he had slept, I set off on a journey of self-exploration and auto-archaeology to recall and reproduce 28 of the places where I have slept. These cold abstract spaces are architectural representations to others, but to me, they are treasure chests holding my most intimate moments – memories frozen in space.
The project can be consulted here.