During my first walk through the Greenwood Cemetery in New York, I noticed how common the gravestones do not mention a name nor context about the passed away person - nor a glimpse of what they mean to the still living. No birth date or date of death, no personal line of a life lived. The only thing remaining and eternalized in stone, is the binary role someone had (and therefore, still has) in the biological family.

I spent many hours at the cemetery and came across so many mothers, daughters, fathers, aunts and uncles, sometimes unclear to which family name someone still “belonged”. Often there was ‘his wife’ and not surprisingly, rarely ‘her husband’.

Giving I have no father in my life, I organically was drawn to all the motherstones as a comforting act and it became an obsession to capture as many of them as I could. It may say something about absence or about presence: the obsession could have easily been the other way around.

The motherstones represent for me ideas of mothership and caretakers, also apart from binary perspectives. And I kept thinking about the other, how deeply alienation is rooted and how someone (also, you) can exist outself yourself.

Later, I found a beautiful stone on the streets, decided to carve for the other, whoever that may be, and return it to the cemetery. A death for alienation, and a recognization we are all, also, other.

This project will be developed further.