Here are pictures of some work I made today. There is a story to it too. It goes like this:

As a child I loved to peek inside ground-floor windows while walking down the street. I looked into kitchens and saw mothers cooking dinner: potatoes, fried onions, stuffed cabbage with mamaliga. I saw children playing board games or musical instruments, grown-ups playing cards. Cigarette smoke curled upwards in the yellow lamp-light. People laughed or argued or talked on the phone. What I enjoyed most though was watching people watch TV in darkened rooms. At the time in Romania everybody had black and white TV, which enveloped their surroundings in a blueish glow. It was like good theater with so many layers: first of all the program itself– usually a prime-time movie– was fun to watch from the street, the short segment gleaned in passing was a springboard for the imagination; but that was only part of the magic. Watching families sit together, their faces aglow, rapt expressions that changed according to the happenings on the screen, the whole room floating blue in the night like a gift-box, like a spaceship, like a dream. Like it forgot that it was part of a floor, a house, a small, dusty town in a country with no medicine and rationed food.

So how does this relate to my work here in Kamiyama? I found some buildings here which remind me of buildings from my childhood and I realized that even though these might not be the most beautiful buildings around I am strongly attracted to them, they are iconic to me, they comfort me and bring me home just like the mountains and the mist. So I started to think about what we remember and how we remember things, about what brings us comfort and joy, and today I began to build small 3D sets including models of familiar-looking buildings I found in Kamiyama to re-visit old memories and turn them into something new, something less painful and more beautiful.