‘A History of Hollows’ offers an artist’s powerful snapshot of her aging mother’s home

In “Apricots,” the essay which opens her memoir, The Faraway Nearby (2018), the critic Rebecca Solnit writes, “Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions, like arctic tundra or sea ice.”

“To love someone,” she continues, “is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.”

Micaela Benedicto does both in her solo exhibition, A History of Hollows, which closes at Tarzeer Pictures in Makati this week. The hollows she refers to in her title are both architectural and emotional in nature, building out both the sanctuaries and prisons in the architecture of her mother’s story, or at least what could be salvaged of it during a final visit to her childhood home. 

Upon entry to the gallery, viewers are immediately confronted with the ghostly figures of objects: a chair, a screen, and wooden balusters. From Benedicto’s exhibition text, we learn that this domestic scene was created using objects taken from her aging mother’s apartment in Quezon City, before it was sold.

These were then printed in 1:1 scale and mounted at the heights they were originally placed or installed in the house. For these prints, Benedicto uses photogramming — a process similar to cyanotyping, where images are captured by exposing objects that are placed directly on a photo-sensitive surface.

These life-sized negatives appear as shadows in reverse that, in the hands of a sloppier artist, may take the hollows referred to in the title a little too literally. However, in the hands of Benedicto, known for her restraint and precision, they take on a quality that is both haunting and moving.

Further in, both objects and images become more abstracted. From the integrity of the interior architectural forms in the first room, we now see the house’s softer innards: the sleeve of a wedding gown, the pages of a diary. These are sentimental objects once withheld from public view, now laid bare to be inspected by strangers, but stripped of the color and context that bind them to the fullness of someone’s story.

Here, the emotional core of the exhibition becomes more apparent, as the younger Benedicto navigates the hollows forming in her mother’s memories. She attempts to fill these gaps through a slim volume of stories and photos reprinted, this time with greater heft and durability, on blocks of wood, and stacked on a bookcase in the third room, as if to mimic the cozy domesticity of a family home. 

While Benedicto describes the exhibition as a tribute to an aging parent, a means to meet them where they are, A History of Hollows is ultimately about the artist herself, and by extension, anyone trying to make sense of the impending loss of a loved one.

Returning to the passage from Solnit, the work of living and loving “is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story (italics mine).” In the case of Benedicto, who is an architect by trade, A History of Hollows is an attempt at using the vocabulary of her profession not only to give shape to her grief, but to make it inhabitable.

As temporary guests in Benedicto’s mother’s home and mind, we are there with the artist, sharing in the stress of parenting a parent and the anticipatory grief of slowly losing them.

In this way, Hollows can be seen as an autobiographical branch of the lines of inquiry in previous exhibitions, Structures of Unremembering (2021) and Volume (2014). For the latter, writer Bobby Benedicto (the artist’s brother) asks, “What if we thought of nothing or nothingness as having material properties?…Can absence be made to appear, and if so, what would it look like and how would it change the way we perceive and inhabit space?” 

This question however has been asked over the decades, and in varying degrees of engagement, by artists working conceptually and through minimalist abstraction. Ultimately, A History of Hollows shines a light not on the intimate details of one family’s multiple tragedies; rather it creates a shared space to reflect on sorrow in its many scales.

There is the grief we go through in our individual relationships and in our reluctance to put the past away, but there is also the sorrow we share as a generation, as our elders and caregivers begin to show signs of deterioration, and the roles reverse. And finally, there is the grief for things beyond our control. 

In Benedicto’s work, these matters are made material, hence graspable: in the pages of a book, in the frame of an image, or in the dimensions of a mounted object. In this way, it goes beyond representing loss, serving as a potent reminder of how we might grow around our grief, enveloping it before it overwhelms us. 

While A History of Hollows gives form to sorrow, by using it as material, it also generates some glimmers of hope through the show’s ephemeral objects. Through the music playing in the space and the light dancing on the walls, Benedicto still makes a note of grief’s most important attribute: that it passes.  

Micaela Benedicto (b.1977) is an architect, musician, and visual artist living and working in Manila. Her work in visual art revolves around the ambiguities of space, memory and perception, often working with three-dimensional constructions to explore these relationships.

A History of Hollows closes on November 7, 2024. Tarzeer Pictures is located at 2288 Chino Roces Ave. extension, Makati City, Metro Manila. Opening hours are from 10am-5:30pm

Installation views courtesy of the artist

– Rappler.com