For a brief moment in time, I met my oldest brother. He made a series of beautiful portraits of me, sixteen years old back then, and just as he arrived into my life, he left again…

In one of those casual walks through our little city, my father announced to me that I had two older brothers. That moment in which the earth stops turning and the world disappears as you feel all the stars twinkle in your bloodstream, gave me an insight into new information that my mother wasn’t his first wife. She was the third. I was as well, the third child and not the one and only. I was the youngest one of three. The privileged one. That took a major adjusting of my lens and a river of questions… 

Ever since I was a small child, I liked sneaking away in my grandparents’ house into a not that much visited room full of unorganised bits and pieces of life and history. I loved to hide in there, connecting bits and pieces of objects, wondering where they came from, what they might have been used for, and who they belonged to in the past. It was a room full of stories, a lot of black and white photos, some torn in half, or with someone cut out, all over the drawers. I liked to try to find the missing pieces and put them together, wondering what could have happened to trigger that act of violence.

One of those fascinating things, inhabiting the drawers of the rarely visited room, were the red, round cartridges of a dangerous object hanging above my grandparents' bed, my grandfather’s hunting gun. 

As I was brought up to believe that humans are the main protagonists in life, and animals are kept for their needs without a grain of doubt about that fact, I was an owner during my childhood, of a very sweet, depressed yellow canary bird in a cage, a couple of uncommunicative tiny fish in a round aquarium, and the sweetest turtle kidnapped from a seaside forest on the way back from one of our summer vacations.

I don’t remember what happened to the yellow bird, I remember that the fish ate each other, and the last golden one died of loneliness, and that my beloved turtle never woke up on one of the early spring days.

Encounters with the dogs which my grandparents kept in the village house were at the level of an annoyance since they were just kept to serve as a live alarm system, barking the whole day and night…

One day, when I was about six years old, my uncle brought home a young woman he wanted to marry. I thought of her as a fascinating petite gentlewoman. Her different beauty than what I have seen in my family mesmerised me. She was quiet and kind. She treated me with warmth and understanding. Almost like a child. I fell in love with her pretty fast.

After the wedding passed in a usual manner, smelling of alcohol, music and reckless joy, she was mostly alone and I was always welcome in her home. I felt being in her company, that nothing else mattered to her, that she had no other ambition at those moments than focussing on my wellbeing, feeding me something delicious or telling funny stories…