Sarah Stefanutti - Agoraphobia
ag·o·ra·pho·bi·a
/ˌaɡərəˈfōbēə/
noun
an anxiety disorder which involves an intense fear of being in open, often public, places or situations where it may be hard to escape, or where help may not be available.
Agoraphobia is a long-term art project on the relationship between subjects and spaces. In particular, I have been following the life of my grandmother, aged 95, and her confinement within her flat, as she hasn’t left this space for over a decade due to past traumatic experiences. I tried to capture the daily rituals of a domestic life that is mostly marked by stillness and silence. The more I dug into the representation of my grandmother’s agoraphobia, the more a strange sense of claustrophobia emerged within me in the solitude of her apartment. And yet, although my grandmother’s condition makes her life challenging, lacking human contact, I couldn’t help but notice how her inner world has become filled with fascinating details marked by subtle daily domestic rituals and great care for her space. The domestic space becomes both a home-temple as well as home-prison from which she cannot escape. Although this project started a few years ago, I can’t help but think of how current it has become in the last few weeks, where most of us find ourselves in some form of physical confinement due to the Covid-19 lockdowns. The unique life of my grandmother suddenly becomes strangely familiar to each one of us; and my work, that intended to capture the strange condition of the isolation of a single human, is now strangely contemporary and representative of the human condition.
