Exploring the mind is for many an abstract and challenging journey, which they would like to embark on, but how? Photographer Roger Ballen and author Didi Bozzini give with 'The House Project' their poetic interpretation, consisting of photographs and texts, which mirror the mind metaphorically. "The mind is like a house, and the house is like the mind. One can move from the basement to the attic by climbing stairs in the house or by a corresponding state, whereby one moves from the deeper untouched consciousness to a place that is linked with the ethereal," Roger Ballen explains. The artistic collaboration was documented by Oodee Publishing in its 108-page book.
Taking cues from 20th century philosopher Gaston Bachelard and his contemporary psychiatrist Carl Jung, Ballen and Bozzini conceived of infrastructure of a house as a tangible and visible analogy for the murky and unnameable contours of the human mind. The fifty motifs featured in The House Project are drawn from earlier works of the Johannesburg-based photographer including 'Small Towns of South Africa' and 'Asylum of the Birds' and almost through and through with previously unreleased photographs - all of which are now presented in the new context of a mental journey.
Ballen and Bozzini take us from the cellar, where we are cast into primordial remains of all that came before us, to the ground floor, where we confront the chaos, noise, and uncertainty that comes with living with others and losing oneself within the crowd. They take up through the first floor, where the physical structures of our brains mirrored in a library in which our life stories are recorded in words, symbols, pictures and where we finally discover who it is we are.
Roger Ballen & Didi Bozzini – The House Project . Edition of 1000, first 250 hand-numbered and stamped, 108 pages . ISBN 978-0-9570389-74 . oodee.net