ABSTRACT
Jan Lauwers (b. 1957), the Belgian artist who has created this piece, combines his personal family history with the fictional life of
Isabella Morandi, a blind old woman who has ‘seen’ all the horrible events of the twentieth century. Now in her nineties, blind Isabella is nevertheless unrelenting in her pursuit of happiness and her passion for life. ‘What a waste of time is pain,’ she proclaims in a key scene/ song. The performance Lauwers has created combines a commemoration of the life of his father with a meditation on the tensions between memory, history and imagination. Felix Lauwers, who died in 2002, had collected 3,800 objects and artefacts, mostly from Egypt and Africa, and displayed many of them in the family home. Growing up among these objects, Lauwers simply saw them as his father’s obsession, but when he died and left them all to his wife and children, the question of what to do with them and what they might mean became urgent. A history of colonialism, mementoes of a past time sealed off from the present – Lauwers felt they had no useful purpose. ‘And when such a collection is just handed to you, you also have to decide what you’re going to do with it,’ he said. ‘It’s an ethical question too, because many of these objects were probably stolen from their original creators and ended up in a setting where they don’t belong’ (quoted in T’Jonk 2004).
