MOTHER AND SON – SON AND FATHER
I have worked for a long time with my childhood memories. With those building blocks that shape a person’s personality and my relationship with the surrounding world. How did I deal with uncertainty, chaos, and adventures as a child? What tools did I have? I have only now realized that I have always handled every situation by turning it into stories, in the form of text and images. The original texts were written in Swedish.
I have been involved in such projects for most of my life, from my thesis where I strolled in Berlin (1989) to Pilgrimage and currently working on my deceased father. There’s a place, a thought, and a desire to transform feelings and thoughts into images, something to share with others. The final form will be an exhibition comprising photographs and text, and this exhibition marks the initial version of this project.
Lars Rebers
(born 1963, Loviisa) is an art photographer, art educator, and a student for life. He has graduated as a Master of Arts in 1990 and as an art educator in 1996 from The University of Arts. Rebers has had several exhibitions in Finland. He is a member of The Association of Photographic Artists.
One of the texts in the exhibition
The Last Conversation
Over the years, we didn’t communicate very often. If we did, it was usually initiated by me. My sister and I, when I was 15 years old, started traveling around Europe with an Interrail pass, also making a detour to visit him. Initially, I had the attitude of never announcing my arrival beforehand. He had separated from us, not I from him. Harridan, his wife, and he always found it inappropriate even though they always welcomed me or us. There was a routine, yet it seemed like nothing stuck. Somehow, he had still distanced himself from his children.
My sister and I had a lot of patience with him. When we were younger, he used to send Christmas presents to Finland, a month or so after Christmas. Gifts that Harridan’s son, the Idiot, and his spoiled sister didn’t want, so we had to start the now-trendy circular economy.
Once, we met my father’s sister and half-sister from Germany. They told us that our father had funded my sister’s and my university education. Of course, that’s not true, but one could take it as if we were in his thoughts, and that, means something.
No matter what you try, time always runs out eventually. Towards the end, my father was in a nursing home. A few weeks before his death, I called him. It was an old habit; after all, I hadn’t divorced him. It was clear that he wasn’t quite himself. His memory failed him. He only talked about Harridan, his wife and the Idiot, sometimes mentioning his wonderful vacations in Turkey. I continued the conversation and finally asked him about his children in Finland; it took him a while to orient himself. After a moment, he replied that we were out playing in the yard. Perhaps his sailor buddy was also on his way to us so that we could finally go to Porvoo to check out girls.