Photobook | Nobody’s home : Nu-i nimeni acasă

My grandparents’ house has remained unoccupied since my grandmother’s death ten years ago. No one disturbed the order in the house, only the rain and the weather did. Nothing was moved or taken and the house became more of a museum of Teoderașcu’s family memory. After all this time I went, for the first time, to the house in April 2019, when I began to reconstruct the family’s and home’s history. In June I returned with my father. He hadn’t been there in all these years, and when he saw how degraded the house was, he began to sigh and cry. He told me he felt like everything was transforming in ruins. So did his two sisters, a few weeks later, when I invited them to their childhood home. Each of them opened the doors with fear and at each corner they were struck by a memory from the time when their parents were still living. I remade my first visit dozens of times, in different months, I collected documents, I read letters and postcards and I tried to archive and even reconstruct the memories left between the walls of the house swollen and shrivelled by water and time, in an attempt to slow down the physical damage my father was talking about.

Original photobook titles: Nobody’s home / Nu-i nimeni acasă
Languages: English and Romanian
Hardcover made using original materials from the house
First Edition (2 copies) – March 2020
Printed in the United Kingdom, London, Bookworks
Text and photographs © Ionuț Teoderașcu 2020 
All rights reserved.