Place to be



One month going every working day to paint at the cemetery of my village. November. The grey month. Grey like the road, the church, the stones of the graves. But here, above all the dead lying in the earth: flowers, hundreds of flowers! Yellow. Red, orange, purple, touches of green leaves, sometimes a fake blue. And white. Not the white of snow – that makes one forget everything - but the white of celebration.

What we do with our dead does matter to us. The kind of attention it demands to look after them is like no other. It’s a mirror – a true mirror. What we see there is precisely «us».

Each tomb is a world. An unknown world, except for a few signs that speak. If one listens, a cemetery is full of stories. Individual stories that speak of destinies. A father who died to early, a centenary, couples who passed away together, a child named «angel». And countless more, each one gradually making it's way in us as we visit. And all together they become one symphony.

In November the subject of the conversations going-on in the cemetery is all about flowers. By depositing these colourful gifts on each grave, the living lay a patchwork blanket over the ones who are no longer there to do it and in return the community is then complete – living and dead (touching) on both sides of the blanket.



2020