My House is Burned but I Scatter My Blossoms Like Nothing Happened

2024 . Sound . 0:59:36

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My House is Burned but I Scatter My Blossoms Like Nothing Happened is a film about memory in which the image has been removed. Without prescribed image, what remains is voice, sound and place.

 

The work began with a return to sites of childhood, migration, joy and rupture across the Paphos district of Cyprus. But on returning, many of these places no longer existed as remembered. Sites, buildings, trees and streets had changed, disappeared, or lost their meaning. Faced with the collapse of memory’s image, Petrou chose to burn the visual track of the film and leave only the sound.

 

Through field recordings and spoken reflections captured on site, the work moves through ruins, fields, coastlines and towns, tracing a geography shaped by absence and persistence.

 

Presented as a listening situation at viewpoints or public sites, the surrounding landscape becomes the film’s image. Each presentation unfolds within a different city, town or horizon, allowing the place of listening to complete the work