“For what I have lost is not a Figure (the mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.” (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.75)

When I lost my mother at the end of 2020, I was emotionally exhausted. I couldn’t do anything except try to remember, remember the moments which we spent together, the scent of her body, her voice, and the tone of her speech. The fear of forgetting the fragments of her existence, her touch, her face, and all that meant motherhood led me to preserve them. To me, the objects represent her portrait, the portrait which I missed to seize. To express my feelings, I used the rhetoric of still life. The pale images that lack details convey a sense of absence and suspense in the space. Death lingers in the pale background of the objects in the images. The objects that belonged to her carry out the memories from the past, deciphering specific moments of my life. These frames are an attempt to capture the longing to remember the ephemeral moments though the despair of not being able to remember all of them remains.